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Show HN: I made a privacy-first, minimalistic browser for Hacker News

5 points by bithavoc 7y ago

bithavoc 7y ago
Author here. I used to Safari on iPhone to browse HN but I never felt comfortable mixing a trusted browsing session such as the HN front page and discussion with externally linked articles in the stories, so I built a simple browser to ensure that every article opens in a temporary browsing session that is fast, secure, and stable. everything else works as expected including your regular sign-in, upvote, flagging comments and other sessions of the hacker news web experience The backend is a very simple Go service with two endpoints and a Postgres database that keep tracks of all the broadcasted stories. The backend directly scraps the front page of HN because the official Firebase API reports different top stories than the front page. The app is pure Swift+UIKit with a Combination of tricks around WKWebView navigation, WKWebView gestures and Navigation Controller to create a consistent browsing zone for your HN front page and temporary browsing zones for the articles. The app tracks analytics anonymously without any third-party SDK.
yohannparis 7y ago
I was wondering if your app improves the touch area on the clickable element? Reaching the small arrows and collapse is a bit of hit and miss on safari.
- bithavoc 7y ago
  Cool suggestion. This and adding support for Dark mode is on my list of improvements for future versions. In this version the layout of the front-page remains the same including the size of the clickable elements such as links to comments, article domain and op links. The reason I didn't change is because I tried other HN client apps in the AppStore that use different home page layouts and I always go back to Safari because I'm so used to click the small elements. It's certainly something that can be improved though, maybe the default layout is like Safari's but with an option to have the enhanced layout with bigger elements.
  - yohannparis 7y ago
    I was thinking of just adding pseudo-elements on top of the existing links to make their clickable area bigger and not touching the design of the website per se. https://webdesigntips.blog/web-design/css-tricks/enhancing-the-clickable-area-size/ https://webdesigntips.blog/web-design/css-tricks/enhancing-t...
    - bithavoc 7y ago
      Yeah I can totally do that. Feel free to send me an email if you would like to be the first to try it via Testflight.
mtmail 7y ago
Awesome. Can you add a link to https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news/ https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news/ ?

5 points by bithavoc 7y ago

Author here. I used to Safari on iPhone to browse HN but I never felt comfortable mixing a trusted browsing session such as the HN front page and discussion with externally linked articles in the stories, so I built a simple browser to ensure that every article opens in a temporary browsing session that is fast, secure, and stable. everything else works as expected including your regular sign-in, upvote, flagging comments and other sessions of the hacker news web experience The backend is a very simple Go service with two endpoints and a Postgres database that keep tracks of all the broadcasted stories. The backend directly scraps the front page of HN because the official Firebase API reports different top stories than the front page. The app is pure Swift+UIKit with a Combination of tricks around WKWebView navigation, WKWebView gestures and Navigation Controller to create a consistent browsing zone for your HN front page and temporary browsing zones for the articles. The app tracks analytics anonymously without any third-party SDK.

yohannparis 7y ago

I was wondering if your app improves the touch area on the clickable element? Reaching the small arrows and collapse is a bit of hit and miss on safari.

bithavoc 7y ago
Cool suggestion. This and adding support for Dark mode is on my list of improvements for future versions. In this version the layout of the front-page remains the same including the size of the clickable elements such as links to comments, article domain and op links. The reason I didn't change is because I tried other HN client apps in the AppStore that use different home page layouts and I always go back to Safari because I'm so used to click the small elements. It's certainly something that can be improved though, maybe the default layout is like Safari's but with an option to have the enhanced layout with bigger elements.
- yohannparis 7y ago
  I was thinking of just adding pseudo-elements on top of the existing links to make their clickable area bigger and not touching the design of the website per se. https://webdesigntips.blog/web-design/css-tricks/enhancing-the-clickable-area-size/ https://webdesigntips.blog/web-design/css-tricks/enhancing-t...
  - bithavoc 7y ago
    Yeah I can totally do that. Feel free to send me an email if you would like to be the first to try it via Testflight.

mtmail 7y ago

Awesome. Can you add a link to https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news/ https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news/ ?