6 ms·

Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

54 points by dporan 16y ago

zeedotme 16y ago
superb!
zeedotme 16y ago
I couldn't resist trying to open this particular link over and over again - disappointingly you can't get very far :)
- dporan 16y ago
  The recursion makes for a fun Mondrian-like UI!
itsnotvalid 16y ago
Well, I really hate frames. Although doing that may use up more bandwidth, please make it ajax-like such that we don't need to see any of the original hn frames again (yes hn has no API which makes commenting much harder to achieve)
- dporan 16y ago
  I have mixed feelings about frames, too. In this case, I think the benefits of seeing everything at once might outweigh the drawbacks. (It's all Dojo JavaScript, by the way. No actual HTML frames were involved in the making of this product!)
  - wahnfrieden 16y ago
    Dojo is a great toolkit that could use more evangelism. Showing separate sites like this necessitates some kind of frames, I thought this was a pretty good use of them.
    - dporan 16y ago
      Very impressed by Dojo. It's amazing how you can do almost everything declaratively -- via markup. That makes it easy to put together simple UIs like this one.
      - wahnfrieden 16y ago
        Yea, I used to be puritan about it and tried to do everything with Dijit imperatively through JavaScript, but it's so much easier most of the time to do it in markup. It's even entirely HTML compliant now that it uses the new custom "data" tag attributes in HTML5.
  - itsnotvalid 16y ago
    Well, I guess it is still HTML frames, just that Dojo created those nodes. I am aware that there are no better solution for now.
ladon86 16y ago
Very nice. Maybe you could you apply a different stylesheet to the comments, and hide any elements which allow you to click through to stories. Just removing everything above the comment box would be fine.
wccrawford 16y ago
Could be improved to having a quick way to swap the sizes of the 2 right-hand frames. When I read HN, I generally read the comments first, then the article. If the comments were big first, then I could click something to make the actual page big, it would be nice. Granted, I probably still wouldn't use the interface since I read from the RSS, but I think it would improve the site.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  Perhaps there could be a hotkey to collapse the frames and serially focus the one frame - like Alt-Tab but internal to the site; or simply a floating toolbar with the standard layout, article layout, comment layout as option buttons.
gregschlom 16y ago
I don't mind the frames, it gives a nice "back to 1999" look :) But I do miss the story points on the left frame, as I tend to look first for stories with 100 points or more. EDIT: I think I'm going to use hnvue as my main UI for reading HN for the next couple of days.
- dporan 16y ago
  The score would be a handy addition. That's not part of the RSS feed, but I'm using YQL to screen scrape anyway, so it wouldn't be hard to add. I'm curious to hear how hnvue works over a few days.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
khh 16y ago
I have a widescreen monitor and I suspect most people do. How about making the content and comments appear side by side instead? A "pop-out" link for each frame would also be nice.
- dporan 16y ago
  Definitely a possibility. This is the minimal viable prototype! I'll have to think bigger for version 0.00002. :-)
oemera 16y ago
Hey dporan this is awesome! It would be more awesome if you: - could go to "full page view" when clicking on a Hacker News submission for best web experience - could add a function to scroll the left and bottom frames where it was before "full page view" mode (at the moment you have to scroll it manually after everytime you visted a page and wanted to see it on full page view - could only show the comments from HN on the bottom frame without HN navigation and all I hope I could help to make the user experience better! Cheers
- dporan 16y ago
  All good ideas. Re showing comments without the HN navbar: that would involve some more complex screen scraping, but I agree that it would be nice to maximize the space for the most interesting info.
thristian 16y ago
I find that one of the signifiers I use to decide which front-page stories to read is "how many comments are there"; sadly this view doesn't include that information. Also, when opening a link from the sidebar, sometimes it takes a while for the page to load, during which time the previous page is still displayed. It'd be less confusing if the old page were replaced with a "loading..." message of some kind.
- dporan 16y ago
  A new version -- hot off the servers -- now shows all of the classic HN info: points, poster, time, and comments. And there's also a "Loading..." message. Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's fun to do same-day development.
terra_t 16y ago
Wow, this is the first site I've seen to use frames in about 10 years!
- rajasharan 16y ago
  everyone has been using iframes though.
  - dporan 16y ago
    Iframes are everywhere, but usually in places where it's hard to notice them, e.g., in ads.
jokermatt999 16y ago
Perhaps this is blasphemy, but I...actually like the frames look here. It works, and it makes sense for what it's trying to do, imo. I'd like to see points/comments in the left hand pane, but otherwise I love it. (Also, am I the only one who kept recursively opening this story in hnvue?)
anarchitect 16y ago
Nice. I definitely agree with the comments to show the points and number of comments, but apart from that I think it's really great.
aroberge 16y ago
This is very nice; please find a way to add the number of points and comments as others have mentioned. Contrary to some opinions expressed in the comments, I think that your use of frame is very appropriate and efficient.
bobwaycott 16y ago
Several weeks ago, I made a Chrome extension with an identical interface for the same purpose. I wanted to be able to read through HN in one window, article on top, comments on bottom, just as you've done. Like seeing I'm not alone. I also ran into the same issues I see hitting your implementation, as well -- namely, sites that do not like to be framed ruin the HN-in-a-window viewer.
- dporan 16y ago
  Alas, some sites do bust out of frames. I understand their reasons, but it does make things more complicated for a design like this one. By the way, when a site does bust out of hnvue, I've noticed that the page can get into a weird state. Closing the browser window (or tab) and reopening hnvue is probably the best solution at the moment.
trotsky 16y ago
I definitely use the number of upvotes, number of comments and post age as part of my decision whether or not to read an article.
donniefitz2 16y ago
I really like this view. Good job of putting all the useful information HN offers in one view. Now, how long will this be around? You planning on enhancing it?
- dporan 16y ago
  I'm going to use it myself, so I'll leave it up and try to enhance it.
kristofferR 16y ago
I've used something like this for a few months actually. http://blog.libinpan.com/2010/06/hackernews-safari/ http://blog.libinpan.com/2010/06/hackernews-safari/ The advantage with the plugin in comparison to tnvue is that the classic HN-look is preserved (including number of comments).
holyjaw 16y ago
Wonderful experiment. Bookmarked. Will be using for the next few days; have fun A/B testing. -You're probably trying to differentiate from the original HN but I'd prefer to maintain the HN orange theme if possible.
- dporan 16y ago
  Re the theme: I just used one of the Dojo defaults. It's easy to swap them.
w1ntermute 16y ago
If you get the chance, I'd like to see the adding of keyboard shortcuts for expanding/shrinking the different views.

54 points by dporan 16y ago

zeedotme 16y ago

superb!

zeedotme 16y ago

I couldn't resist trying to open this particular link over and over again - disappointingly you can't get very far :)

dporan 16y ago
The recursion makes for a fun Mondrian-like UI!

itsnotvalid 16y ago

Well, I really hate frames. Although doing that may use up more bandwidth, please make it ajax-like such that we don't need to see any of the original hn frames again (yes hn has no API which makes commenting much harder to achieve)

dporan 16y ago
I have mixed feelings about frames, too. In this case, I think the benefits of seeing everything at once might outweigh the drawbacks. (It's all Dojo JavaScript, by the way. No actual HTML frames were involved in the making of this product!)
- wahnfrieden 16y ago
  Dojo is a great toolkit that could use more evangelism. Showing separate sites like this necessitates some kind of frames, I thought this was a pretty good use of them.
  - dporan 16y ago
    Very impressed by Dojo. It's amazing how you can do almost everything declaratively -- via markup. That makes it easy to put together simple UIs like this one.
    - wahnfrieden 16y ago
      Yea, I used to be puritan about it and tried to do everything with Dijit imperatively through JavaScript, but it's so much easier most of the time to do it in markup. It's even entirely HTML compliant now that it uses the new custom "data" tag attributes in HTML5.
- itsnotvalid 16y ago
  Well, I guess it is still HTML frames, just that Dojo created those nodes. I am aware that there are no better solution for now.

ladon86 16y ago

Very nice. Maybe you could you apply a different stylesheet to the comments, and hide any elements which allow you to click through to stories. Just removing everything above the comment box would be fine.

wccrawford 16y ago

Could be improved to having a quick way to swap the sizes of the 2 right-hand frames. When I read HN, I generally read the comments first, then the article. If the comments were big first, then I could click something to make the actual page big, it would be nice. Granted, I probably still wouldn't use the interface since I read from the RSS, but I think it would improve the site.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
Perhaps there could be a hotkey to collapse the frames and serially focus the one frame - like Alt-Tab but internal to the site; or simply a floating toolbar with the standard layout, article layout, comment layout as option buttons.

gregschlom 16y ago

I don't mind the frames, it gives a nice "back to 1999" look :) But I do miss the story points on the left frame, as I tend to look first for stories with 100 points or more. EDIT: I think I'm going to use hnvue as my main UI for reading HN for the next couple of days.

dporan 16y ago
The score would be a handy addition. That's not part of the RSS feed, but I'm using YQL to screen scrape anyway, so it wouldn't be hard to add. I'm curious to hear how hnvue works over a few days.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

khh 16y ago

I have a widescreen monitor and I suspect most people do. How about making the content and comments appear side by side instead? A "pop-out" link for each frame would also be nice.

dporan 16y ago
Definitely a possibility. This is the minimal viable prototype! I'll have to think bigger for version 0.00002. :-)

oemera 16y ago

Hey dporan this is awesome! It would be more awesome if you: - could go to "full page view" when clicking on a Hacker News submission for best web experience - could add a function to scroll the left and bottom frames where it was before "full page view" mode (at the moment you have to scroll it manually after everytime you visted a page and wanted to see it on full page view - could only show the comments from HN on the bottom frame without HN navigation and all I hope I could help to make the user experience better! Cheers

dporan 16y ago
All good ideas. Re showing comments without the HN navbar: that would involve some more complex screen scraping, but I agree that it would be nice to maximize the space for the most interesting info.

thristian 16y ago

I find that one of the signifiers I use to decide which front-page stories to read is "how many comments are there"; sadly this view doesn't include that information. Also, when opening a link from the sidebar, sometimes it takes a while for the page to load, during which time the previous page is still displayed. It'd be less confusing if the old page were replaced with a "loading..." message of some kind.

dporan 16y ago
A new version -- hot off the servers -- now shows all of the classic HN info: points, poster, time, and comments. And there's also a "Loading..." message. Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's fun to do same-day development.

terra_t 16y ago

Wow, this is the first site I've seen to use frames in about 10 years!

rajasharan 16y ago
everyone has been using iframes though.
- dporan 16y ago
  Iframes are everywhere, but usually in places where it's hard to notice them, e.g., in ads.

jokermatt999 16y ago

Perhaps this is blasphemy, but I...actually like the frames look here. It works, and it makes sense for what it's trying to do, imo. I'd like to see points/comments in the left hand pane, but otherwise I love it. (Also, am I the only one who kept recursively opening this story in hnvue?)

anarchitect 16y ago

Nice. I definitely agree with the comments to show the points and number of comments, but apart from that I think it's really great.

aroberge 16y ago

This is very nice; please find a way to add the number of points and comments as others have mentioned. Contrary to some opinions expressed in the comments, I think that your use of frame is very appropriate and efficient.

bobwaycott 16y ago

Several weeks ago, I made a Chrome extension with an identical interface for the same purpose. I wanted to be able to read through HN in one window, article on top, comments on bottom, just as you've done. Like seeing I'm not alone. I also ran into the same issues I see hitting your implementation, as well -- namely, sites that do not like to be framed ruin the HN-in-a-window viewer.

dporan 16y ago
Alas, some sites do bust out of frames. I understand their reasons, but it does make things more complicated for a design like this one. By the way, when a site does bust out of hnvue, I've noticed that the page can get into a weird state. Closing the browser window (or tab) and reopening hnvue is probably the best solution at the moment.

trotsky 16y ago

I definitely use the number of upvotes, number of comments and post age as part of my decision whether or not to read an article.

donniefitz2 16y ago

I really like this view. Good job of putting all the useful information HN offers in one view. Now, how long will this be around? You planning on enhancing it?

dporan 16y ago
I'm going to use it myself, so I'll leave it up and try to enhance it.

kristofferR 16y ago

I've used something like this for a few months actually. http://blog.libinpan.com/2010/06/hackernews-safari/ http://blog.libinpan.com/2010/06/hackernews-safari/ The advantage with the plugin in comparison to tnvue is that the classic HN-look is preserved (including number of comments).

holyjaw 16y ago

Wonderful experiment. Bookmarked. Will be using for the next few days; have fun A/B testing. -You're probably trying to differentiate from the original HN but I'd prefer to maintain the HN orange theme if possible.

dporan 16y ago
Re the theme: I just used one of the Dojo defaults. It's easy to swap them.

w1ntermute 16y ago

If you get the chance, I'd like to see the adding of keyboard shortcuts for expanding/shrinking the different views.