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A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project
- buster 16y agoYes, HN could really need a mobile version. Also, is there some official API? Could people write mobile apps based on HN?
- sjs382 16y agohttp://www.icombinator.net/ http://www.icombinator.net/ I really wish there was a way to comment and vote from the interface, though.
- ronnier 16y agoI really like icombinator but I wanted to address some problems and add new features (View the article text, collapse/expand comments, and return to the previous position when using the browsers back button).
- knipknap 16y agoCool, but doesn't look much different than a simple feed in google reader really.
- Jakob 16y agoYou didn't use the "Article Text" feature, did you? I think that's a really great feature. Especially if you're on a slow connection.
- ronnier 16y agoLike Jakob pointed out, I added the ability to pull the text of the linked article, which still needs some tweaking but works for most normal blog/news articles. It really makes articles readable on phones. It's based arc90's readability. In addition, I added in the ability to read the comments and made them collapsible (like reddit). But yes, if you only want the list of the front page links, the RSS will do. I plan on adding more features soon: -Make comments sortable by date or points -More extensive caching of the comment pages along with the article text (in case either go down) -Improve the overall look and feel
- nikeshhayaran 16y agonice..but looks little bit dull.... anyways nice work..
- gaiusparx 16y agoI actually wish the main site stylesheet can be changed so that the white columns on left and right sides does not show up in mobile screen. This will save spaces, make the text bigger and make navigation/zooming easier on small screen.
- wmf 16y agoI guess by mobile you mean iPhone; it looks pretty poor on Fennec/Maemo or probably any landscape device.
- omaranto 16y agoIf it is any consolation it doesn't look very nice on the iPhone in landscape either.
- ronnier 16y agoI fixed the landscape problem. It turns out that adding -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; prevents the text from enlarging when rotating the phone to landscape. Adding that appears to have fixed it.
- quizbiz 16y agoHow does this work?
- ronnier 16y agoFor the home page, I request the HTML from HN, process it, and create a collection of elements that represent a HN news item: URL, Title, # of comments, ID, Posted By, Date, and so on. Then use that to generate the new HTML. I cache that for 200 seconds and store a copy in the event that I can't read the HTML from HN. Works just about the same way for the comments , except it adds some additional functionality like collapsing comments. With the nature of comments being nested, a recursive function worked really well on rendering the output. The article text functionality uses the algorithm from arc 90's readability project, which is in javascript. I used the main idea behind their readability algorithm for this, except mine runs server side (C#) where theirs is all done on the client.
- franck 16y agoThe 'Article Text' is incredibly useful on old mobiles and slow connections. I will now be able to read actual articles, not just HN comments. Thank you!
- ronnier 16y agoYou're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful. I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it. You can pass any URL through it on this form: http://toadjaw.com/article http://toadjaw.com/article
- augustl 16y agoBookmarked. It is now possible to click the comments link on an iPad without missing 70% of the time. Edit: forget it. The links are target="_blank".
- ronnier 16y agoI just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a new window/tab either.
- Tichy 16y agoFor some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites. I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.
- gregschlom 16y agoOn the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page from being zoomed withe the following meta tag : <meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/> But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.
- mcav 16y ago(that tag is on the site)
- mmelin 16y agoThank you! I've been using iCombinator but half the time I get a Python exception when loading comments. Hope this will work better. Cheers.
- ronnier 16y agoYes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version. The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working on that.
- gregschlom 16y agoIt would be very nice someone purchased a more rememberable url... hnmobile.info is available, for example. I guess that would do the trick. No need of a .com tld here.
- joe-mccann 16y agoWas planning on doing something similar using YQL. Nice one.
- tom_ilsinszki 16y agoAn icon for iPhone users would be nice... EDIT: Oh, and thank you! It really seems to be better than iCombinator.
- ronnier 16y agoDo you know where to find a HN icon in ico format? EDIT: Duh... HN itself has one. I'll use it. EDIT: Ok, I added it. Thanks for reminding me about this.
- eande 16y agogood readable on my iPhone, better than what I have seen so far, nice weekend project. I will keep using it for now. Thank you
- underdown 16y agoWorks and looks great on my gphone.
- sdp 16y agoCould you easily add duckduckgo style infinite scrolling?
- ronnier 16y agoYeah, shouldn't be hard. I'll add that to my list.
- andrewljohnson 16y agoHere I am reading hn on a Droid and boy is it terrible. Text too small. Text poorly wrapped. Buttons misclicked all over the place. So bless you sir. With half a billion smart phones sold in just the last couple of years, this is overdue. You still need to bump up the fonts on the FP about 2 points. On mobile, favor horsey big usable text over any concession to style.
- phunel 16y agoWould love to see the text displayed inversely - whether in traditional terminal style (green text on black background) or something similar to arc90's readability style.
- ronnier 16y agoThat should be doable with just CSS. I put on a "settings" page on my TODO list to do just that.
- phunel 16y agoSounds great. I'll be looking forward to the settings update which I assume will be accessible via a different url (versus user controlled setting)? I.e. toadjaw.com/hninverse Again, nice implementation and it's become my default as of now.
- omaranto 16y agoLooks nice! You should steal my favorite iCombinator feature, though: the Instapaper links. Also, the Article text links all return errors, but I'll take it on faith they produce or will produce in the future some easy to read version of article text.
- s3graham 16y agoI can recommend the HN app on Android market too.
- johns 16y agoPlease add proper support for discussion (Ask HN, etc) posts. This is my #1 annoyance of iCombinator. Too many taps and backs to view the question then view the thread.
- ronnier 16y agoThis will be my #1 priority.
- johns 16y agoGreat! One other piece of feedback. There needs to be more contrast between the meta line (points/name/etc) and the text of the comments.
- ronnier 16y agoDone! Ask HN questions now work. You can also get to the "Ask HN" and "New" questions by clicking the link in the header. I'll work on the contrast problem. I noticed it too, I'm just a horrible designer.
- bdotdub 16y agoAnything in particular you were thinking of? I'm not sure I quite get the feedback.
- johns 16y agoThe OP discussion text is not in the same view as the comments. Otherwise, I love iCombinator!
- steve19 16y agoLooks great!
- steve19 16y agoFeature request: Add the time that has elapsed since last update. For example: "Last fetched 5/30/2010 8:23:51 AM PST (17 minutes ago)"
- twohanded 16y agoI use a mobile browser (Atomic) which has great support for tabs- therefore I liked icombinator because it would by default open artcle links in a new tab. Is there a way that you could have an option stored in a cookie that would determine whether or not to open those links in a new tab? Very excited that you are working on this project and nice work so far!
- ronnier 16y agoThat sounds very doable. I'll eventually have a settings page to set those kinds of options. Thanks for using it!