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Incredible the cottage industry of HN clients that sprouted just because the website is stuck in 1998. Goes to show how the community is so important it can tr

by falling 14y ago

Incredible the cottage industry of HN clients that sprouted just because the website is stuck in 1998. Goes to show how the community is so important it can trump design.

gxs 14y ago
To you it's a negative, to me it's an absolute positive. I can load HN from any device and can pretty much count on it loading quickly and rendering correctly. If you have an iPhone, I can see why you would want an app, however. I don't see how people browse comfortably on that device without word wrap. On a related note, I wish the Android browser had a feature to override HTML tags that prevent you from zooming in on mobile sites. One of the nice things about HTC Sense is that it ignores these tags all together.
- falling 14y ago
  Apps and zooming and reflowing text are just workarounds. I don’t want an app, I want a decent website that can render on a smaller screen. Not hard.
  - jarek 14y ago
    But HN renders just fine on my Nexus One in Opera...?
swalkergibson 14y ago
Good design does not necessarily correlate to fancy javascript animations and cascading whatevers. In my opinion, good design is supposed to facilitate the use of the tool, period. What additional design could be applied to http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com that would make the user experience better while keeping in mind the objective of popularizing the highest voted stories and fostering the community through comments on stories?
- falling 14y ago
  I do not want animations. As you said, design is how something works. I want a readable font. I want modern HTML that adapts to different devices and screens. I want links that don’t expire after I left the page open for half an hour and then fail with stupid errors. I want a website that doesn’t randomly stalls for ten seconds. This is basically just what all these clients do. All these 3rd party clients are brittle hacks that scrape the HTML because there is no API or RSS feed. This is bad design, not the lack of animations.

by falling 14y ago

Incredible the cottage industry of HN clients that sprouted just because the website is stuck in 1998. Goes to show how the community is so important it can trump design.

gxs 14y ago

To you it's a negative, to me it's an absolute positive. I can load HN from any device and can pretty much count on it loading quickly and rendering correctly. If you have an iPhone, I can see why you would want an app, however. I don't see how people browse comfortably on that device without word wrap. On a related note, I wish the Android browser had a feature to override HTML tags that prevent you from zooming in on mobile sites. One of the nice things about HTC Sense is that it ignores these tags all together.

falling 14y ago
Apps and zooming and reflowing text are just workarounds. I don’t want an app, I want a decent website that can render on a smaller screen. Not hard.
- jarek 14y ago
  But HN renders just fine on my Nexus One in Opera...?

swalkergibson 14y ago

Good design does not necessarily correlate to fancy javascript animations and cascading whatevers. In my opinion, good design is supposed to facilitate the use of the tool, period. What additional design could be applied to http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com that would make the user experience better while keeping in mind the objective of popularizing the highest voted stories and fostering the community through comments on stories?

falling 14y ago
I do not want animations. As you said, design is how something works. I want a readable font. I want modern HTML that adapts to different devices and screens. I want links that don’t expire after I left the page open for half an hour and then fail with stupid errors. I want a website that doesn’t randomly stalls for ten seconds. This is basically just what all these clients do. All these 3rd party clients are brittle hacks that scrape the HTML because there is no API or RSS feed. This is bad design, not the lack of animations.