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Show HN: Hacky – Hacker News app for Mac
- eliaskg 14y agoHi, app developer here. I hope some of you may like my little app. To prevent too much ranting here are some quick answers to possible questions: Q: The Hacker News website provides much more functionality than your app. A: That's right. The app isn't made to replace the Hacker News website. It's made for frequent readers like me who want a quick and friendly-on-the-eye way to access the stories. Q: I want your app but I don't want to pay for it. A: No problem, Hacky is open source! Just get a copy of the source on GitHub and build it on your machine. Q: Why are you then charging money for it in the first place? A: Personally I like getting my apps via Mac App Store. It means easy updating and restoring. Unfortunately providing an app in the MAS isn't free for the developer as he has to purchase a Developer Certificate from Apple. (Additionally a developer likes to buy a beer from time to time) Relevant Links: Website: http://www.hackyapp.com http://www.hackyapp.com Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacky/id584949645?ls=1&mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacky/id584949645?ls=1&m... GitHub: https://github.com/eliaskg/Hacky https://github.com/eliaskg/Hacky Edit: Here, have some Promo Codes: NPLEWFH4PT6X XNLHAXHPA3FN FRAAR3RL797W MHLW7MH9EYYP KPM36X9KY4EN
- bpatrianakos 14y agoIn a perfect world you wouldn't have to explain that this isn't meant to replace the site or justify charging money for it, but we don't live in a perfect world. I'm on a Windows machine here at work but as soon as I get home I'm going to get this. And thanks for making it open source. I honestly could never understand how anything open source could make money (besides charging for support) but your app finally drove the point home for me. I know how to get your source and compile it myself but I just don't want to go through the hassle so I'm going to buy it. Anyway, thanks for this. I've been hoping someone would make this exact app for a long time now.
- marceldegraaf 14y agoNice! I really like the minimalistic GUI of the app. In addition to joren's comment below it would be great if Vim/Gmail navigation key bindings (or just configurable navigation key bindings) would be available. Navigation with j/k, marking something as read with e/y, ... But thanks for this great first version!
- yuchi 14y agoI love the application. The thing I love most is your "license". I thought to distribute some app in the same way too: "can you build it? It's free if you don't want to pay for it."
- reidrac 14y agoYes, it's a good idea and I like it too. It's OSS but you may pay for the convenience of getting the app perfectly packaged for your OS. Other OSS projects use that model (I can think of Todo.txt Android app, for example). But I'm not sure that it works exactly like "can you build it? It's free if you don't want to pay for it". OSS is about distribution. Anybody can build your app and distribute it legally (in this case Hacky is LGPL, it wouldn't be too difficult to comply with the license), even do it for a fee. It's more paying for "the extras" straight to the developers. Call it support, iTunes, packaging, or just making things easier for people that don't want or don't have the time to get the hands dirty.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoThe one thing with doing that myself that would worry me, is some community project releasing free pre-built versions would spring up.
- karolist 14y agoThat's essentially what happened when XChat (IRC program) started to charge for windows builds.
- petercooper 14y agoDoes/can it update automatically at all?
- randomblast 14y agoI appreciate your efforts. Have half a pint of mediocre beer.
- jug6ernaut 14y agoHey there, awesome work! I just wanted to say good for you for charging for your app! Good work should be rewarded. Users of this developer centric website should understand this most of all! Kudos to you! Keep up the good work.
- julien_c 14y agoGreat work! Which Hacker News API do you use?
- BSousa 14y agoHaven't tried it, but from the screenshots, it seems you need to open the url in the browser. If your goal is so the app allows users a quick view of the stories, having a built in viewer would be nice. Personally I hate switching between apps a lot, and I'm guessing using this would mean - Open story; Switch to Safari to read story; Switch back to Hacky to see next story which if you read more than 1-2 articles would get boring quickly. Just an idea for a future version. Aside from that, good luck and good job. Bruno
- toyg 14y agoOpposite viewpoint: my browser has much more functionality than any embedded browser-view could ever deliver (save to kippt, send to instapaper etc). So I guess this should really be an option (the classic "do you want an external browser? If yes, which browser?" kinda thing).
- kunai 14y agoIf I had a Mac, I would buy this in an instant. Would you consider developing a version to put on the Ubuntu Software Centre?
- kalid 14y agoDon't feel bad about charging for your app. Imagine you are opening a new restaurant. Q: The food plucked from the ground tastes better than yours. A: Great! Pluck away. I offer convenience. Q: I want your meal but don't want to pay for it. A: Uh... ok. Here's the recipe. Cook away. Q: Why are you charging money for your food in the first place? A: I need to pay for knives, forks, and the macronutrients that keep my body alive. I hope that's ok with you. A one-time purchase of a few dollars is well worth saving a HN reader minutes a day.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dewey 14y agoThe site looks a bit weird on a retina display btw. http://i.imgur.com/efSh1hv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/efSh1hv.jpg
- starburst1977 14y agoNice work, Elias. I like it.
- kaolinite 14y agoThis post made my day. I've been after a Hacker News app for Mac for ages now. Edit: have now bought it, it's fantastic. Really glad you made it open-source too. Are there any plans to integrate comments, upvoting, etc? Edit 2: One more thing: it would be great if the app would show the number of unread stories even when closed. Reminders.app does this.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eliaskg 14y agoI will, as soon as I have figured out how to implement that with the minimal look ;)
- joren 14y agoGreat little app. Love the duo of Github and the Mac App Store. I also love my apps straight from the app store. Maybe something little to add to the app are more key-bindings. I'm used to be able to open an url from Twitter apps just by using the right arrow. This would be great to be added to your app. With or without the option to open the website in the background.
- nkohari 14y agoKiller work! Major kudos for making it open source and releasing it on the App Store. I think that's the perfect solution for quality niche apps like yours.
- TamDenholm 14y agoI love the live hacker news feed on the front page, nice touch.
- eliaskg 14y agoThanks! Glad, someone noticed ;)
- interpol_p 14y agoIt freaked me out for a second as I went to check the HN website and back to your screenshot.
- idan 14y agoPretty please port this to iOS too. Please. Please. Please?
- eliaskg 14y agoThere already are really great apps for iOS. If you want a native one, check out https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id434787119?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id434787119?mt=8 If you prefer a web app take a look at http://hackerwebapp.com http://hackerwebapp.com
- ruswick 14y agoI would highly recommend against News:yc, if only because of it's meager integration with read-later services. (Exclusively IP.) Although it is, from what I've seen, the best client on iOS, it is still inferior to and more laborious than the web experience.
- bennyg 14y agoGotta' make sure to plug mine too! Try News/YC: http://subvertapps.com/HN/ http://subvertapps.com/HN/
- davidcollantes 14y agoI really like your app. It crashed once on me, but other than that, very nice. Having the ability to post/reply comments would make it superb!
- jschuur 14y agoLooks great. I have a suggestion though: Beyond individually marking stories as read and the 'mark all as read' button, also offer a quick way to breeze through the list and mark lots of them as read. By 'read', I mean 'don't show them to me again next time'. I usually narrow down 5-8 articles from the home page I want to read and know that I don't care about the others. Or, introduce a 'star' system where I can create a list of articles I want to check out later. I may not actually want to send them to Instapaper, so keeping a local 'to read' list via starring articles would come in handy. Ideally, that should be synced to my iCloud account, since I read from multiple Macbooks.
- jschuur 14y agoI just compiled a build and tried it out. It looks like marking something as read right now just affects the dot icon next to a story with no way to filter out read stories, even after a refresh. Having different hotkeys for mark as read and unread was a little confusing. I would just have Command M toggle between the two. Then you can use the up/down arrow keys to navigate the stories and then quickly mark them. If you accidentally mark the wrong story, you don't need to find Shift to undo that.
- jeffpalmer 14y agoJust purchased, nice work! This is a great minimalistic way to scan the headlines.
- danpalmer 14y agoNice app. Just a few UI and code comments. The titlebar is too big in my opinion. I'm writing an app with a thicker than usual titlebar and had a look around a number of apps before deciding on the exact height. I found the best height to be 36px. This allows for nicely a nicely spaced title and traffic lights, but isn't too large. Clear for Mac goes for a titlebar a bit bigger than this, but Hacky is far larger. The bottom bar seems like it's only there to place the "Mark all as read" button. Could this button be instead placed on the titlebar? If not, I think it's the wrong type of button to use in this context. I believe the correct button style is "Round Textured" as listed in Interface Builder. Despite these two comments, I actually really like the user interface. It looks good and is generally well thought out. A few comments on the project, it might be worth using CocoaPods. This is entirely up to you, but I know for a fact that INAppStoreWindow and AFNetworking are in the database, and it might make handling dependency updates easier. Not using CocoaPods isn't necessarily a bad thing at all though. Having had a quick look at the code, and having compiled it, there are a lot of compiler warnings! A few can be fixed just be configuring the project correctly, adding frameworks that AFNetworking wants for additional functionality, etc, but a few issues surrounding your mixed use of instance variables and properties that will generate their own. There is also an issue with declaring a method as taking NSUInteger pointers, and yet using it for normal NSUIntegers, and then assigning to NSUInteger properties. It works, but it's an easy fix and pointer issues can be annoying to debug later on if they start to cause errors.
- eliaskg 14y agoAwesome feedback! It's noted and will be investigated as soon as I have time ;)
- serencial 14y agoGreat job Elias! Just purchased. It would be great if you can add a "send to pocket" feature.
- alexmic 14y agoYou can have a beer on me! Just bought. Good work :)
- adhipg 14y agoI love the fact that the 'screenshot' on the website is a real-time representation of the Hacker News front page at that point of time. Nice!
- nlh 14y agoDidn't notice that until you pointed it out, but indeed - that is a terrific little bit of functionality on the website. Nicely done OP - I'm sure that's one of the many little details you worked hard on and it's appreciated.
- fudged71 14y agoIt's such a subtle thing. But to the powerusers that this is trying to attract, it's huge! "I want the fastest updating HN app. Oh wow, even their website is at the bleeding edge!"
- omaranto 14y agoWell, maybe. At the moment, the 'screenshot' on the website is a blank Mac OS window with the title 'Hacky (24)' and a never-ending spinner in the upper right corner.
- joeblau 14y agoFunny thing is that the screenshot was ahead of my browser even after I refreshed!
- testuserrrr 14y agoJust bought it - greetings from berlin! I like it! The possibility to make it horizontally smaller would be nice.
- jmotion 14y agoThis is awesome :) Would anyone be interested in something like this for Windows? If so I'd be willing to code it up in Adobe AIR.
- yawgmoth 14y agoSure. As far as I know[1], there are no Hacker News readers for Windows 8 ('metro app'). [1] - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/search#q=hacker+news http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/search#q=hacker+n...
- jschuur 14y agoA few more ideas: - Growl/Notification center notices for new stories (optionally configurable by a certain points threshold). - Subscribe to certain topics (keyword based searches). Only get notified when certain topics have stories. - Ignore stories by user. - Search (both locally and offer to use hnsearch.com) - List new submissions (separate tab?). - Comments/open hotkeys (previously mentioned here, I see). - Minimize to Mac OS menu with an icon indicating new stories (follows your notification threshold and/or topic subscriptions). - Tab to monitor your own submissions.
- gorekee 14y ago> Subscribe to certain topics Love the idea. > List new submissions (separate tab?). Or sort by new submissions. - restore app position and size
- manmal 14y agoDefinitely need the menu icon! I bought it but was disappointed that this is not included. IMO this is needed for the product to be viable.
- thejerz 14y agoBeautiful app, nice work. But if you're reading hacker news this much, how do you get anything done?
- eliaskg 14y agoJust click "Mark all as read" all the time :D
- cooldeal 14y agoWhat's up with the lack of contrast on the text? I blame Apple for the trend, although you could tell apart sites and blogs developed by Mac using developers by that trademark gray on white text. http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
- NickFitz 14y agoYou do realise Apple's site is listed as an example of a site with good contrast on contrastrebellion.com?
- quarterto 14y agoThis is great. My 1.274 pence: have the "unread" icons below the list numbers so the alignment doesn't go all out of whack.
- e1ven 14y agoNice Idea! Purchased in the MAS. Since you seem to want to make it better, Let me give you a few suggestions. I like where you're going, but get the sense you want to improve it, so in that spirit- It feels more like an RSS reader than a dedicated app. Because it doesn't have deep API integration (or even write support), there's not much that I get that I don't get with a dedicated HN RSS reader. Take a look at Envelope for Reddit for an example of how you might do a deeper integration. Beyond adding posting support, you could also build on the fact that it's a client-app, and add additional local-only feature, such as killfiles or filters, etc. Low-hanging fruit would be to display comments inline, rather than just linking off to the website, and letting you read/reply/post to individual threads. GL, I hope you keep going with it.
- slash-dot 14y agoI'd add j/k keyboard shortcuts and the ability to view comments within the app. Otherwise great work!
- jbrooksuk 14y agoI'll happily pay for this with "Send to Pocket" included :)
- eliaskg 14y agoI wanted to say that I'm really overwhelmed by the love you guys are giving Hacky. I actually thought it would be either ignored completely or bashed to the ground. ;) You rock!
- rdl 14y agoI just bought this -- it's really nice. Maybe you'd consider doing a free app store version with ads, combined with a $2.99 (reslly, should be more like $5-10 once you add more features) version? Random feature ideas: Filtering based on keywords or a tagging system or poster id. Doing something which tracks your own comments would be nice. i.e. if you upvote or comment on a story, it somehow marks it in Hacky as well and keeps tracking. Also, "show new comments since I last read the article" might be nice. I guess this might go against the "simple, doesn't need to be logged in" design philosophy so far.
- jhadi 14y ago$2.99 for just links to site? :/
- hamxiaoz 14y agoIt would be better if it could stay on the menubar, like the istat menus.
- daniel_nakano 14y agoI just downloaded Hacky from app store now but the app doesn't work. Are there any problems for using in Japan.
- maxpert 14y agoYou should have kept reader free so that people actually download the app and keep features like commenting and ranking from app paid. Anywayz great work I will be sticking to site itself.
- seanconaty 14y agoAnyone know a good site to read HN on an iPhone? (Not an app.)
- lukes386 14y agoTry http://ihackernews.com/ http://ihackernews.com/
- pknerd 14y agoLovely interface,I am mostly on browser so happy with Chrome Extension. I wish you all the best and yes, I loved the license you're offering. Eventually it's gonna help a developer anyway ;)
- rcruzeiro 14y agoI'm going to take a look at the source but I am also buying it from the AppStore as there is no way that I can convince myself that you don't deserve $2.99 from me for this app. Awesome work!
- tubbo 14y agoBrilliant! I've been waiting for a better UI for ages...
- hedsht 14y agoIs there any kind of a licence model for things like this? (code is up on github, but on sale at the mac store)
- rgo 14y agoThere is nothing wrong with selling open source software. On the contrary, it's rather encouraged by the community: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- ville 14y agoAny screenshots of the comment screen? As that is where I spend most of the time, would be nice to know how it works before making the decision to buy this.
- srgpqt 14y agoNo comment screen in the current version ; it opens HN in your web browser instead.
- lobster_johnson 14y agoAs a fellow Cocoa dev, may I ask why you're using PXListView? AppKit has a view-based table view now (since 10.7?) that covers the same feature set. Moreover, PX has not been maintained since 2011, and there is a bunch of issues and pull requests that are being ignored. There are some forks that fix things, but no canonical one. PS: Nice app, good work!
- jurist 14y agoYour app may not be intended to replace the website but it doesn't actually work. That's the problem with your app; it isn't functional.
- hnriot 14y agoI just don't see the point, it's lacking in basic features and there's nothing wrong with a browser tab in my opinion. Best if luck, but I try not to replace perfectly functional web pages with apps.
- randomsearch 14y agoBought it... needs a bit more functionality, but it's a good start! I'd be fascinated to hear how many downloads you got through the app store and other sources after this post. i.e. are such 'niche' apps sustainable, financially? And what percentage of people liked the convenience of the app store, or wanted to contribute, such that they actually bought the app? RS