Show HN: Hacker News Mobile - A fast and readable mobile HN website

by JoelSutherland on 9/15/2011, 9:00 PM with 58 comments
  • by JoelSutherland on 9/15/2011, 9:08 PM

    I started on this Tuesday after work. Because of some great APIs that are available, it really came together quickly. Most of the credit goes to this one in particular:

    http://api.ihackernews.com/

    It's all JS/client-side templating. Ask any questions if you have them. It works great as a Shortcut app on the iPhone.

    edit: Lots of requests for a back button -- I'll be sure to add that!

  • by genieyclo on 9/15/2011, 9:14 PM

    Looks great, I'll try it out. I've been using iHackernews.com for awhile and to my knowledge pretty much every other hacker news app out there uses their api as well. They had a problem where they were always having 502 errors when you clicked on comments for a post for awhile, but this seems to have been fixed in the last couple of weeks or something.

  • by petercooper on 9/15/2011, 9:55 PM

    I've been working on a HN-esque design for a non HN site and had taken a similar approach with using favicons as this variant does. I think the icons really help and also assist with identification (of, say, TechCrunch articles.. whether you do or don't want to read them). What do people make of their use in this project?

  • by grisha on 9/15/2011, 10:21 PM

    Very nice. I read HN from my iPhone a lot, and it's mobile version would be very handy.

    However, using this, I quickly realised that original design has some advantages (though, maybe it is just habit issues). Usually I scan frontpage fast for new highrated entries to read first, and having 10 entries on screen in time is more suited for this. With 4 it's just another experience. I feel that I need more time to find something interesting.

    Maybe you can improve this, for example, indicating rating with color or size of rating digits.

  • by johnbatch on 9/15/2011, 10:31 PM

      Rats! There has been an Error. This application depends on a number of external APIs,  sometimes they don't always work. When this happens, your best bet is to reload.
    Happens on a few of the comment links

    EDIT: looks like the same thing happens on ihackernews - http://ihackernews.com/comments/3001808 - http://hn.gethifi.com/#/comments/3001808

  • by jemeshsu on 9/15/2011, 10:21 PM

    Sorry I don't get it. Isn't http://ihackernews.com already the mobile version of HN? The site where you get the API.

  • by DougWebb on 9/15/2011, 10:25 PM

    Nice. I created something like this that was text-only back in my Blackberry days, but when I switched to Android and jQueryMobile came out I enhanced my site to its current state: http://webbindustries.com/cgi-bin/myfeeds.cgi

    It's old school: perl mirroring the RSS feed and writing out simple html markup for jQueryMobile to format. It supports a bunch of other feeds too (I used to read more than just HN this way) and it switches to a nice multi-column format on larger devices.

  • by crenshaw on 9/15/2011, 10:16 PM

    Doesn't work on IE5 mobile. :-) (I did actually try though)

  • by bgarbiak on 9/15/2011, 10:14 PM

    Lovely. The only thing missing is a back button placed somewhere inside the page (so it can be used as a full screen app on iPhone).

  • by ericmsimons on 9/15/2011, 11:59 PM

    Really cool! It doesn't work on WP7 though (which doesn't matter too much, because most people don't have a WP7 device)

  • by Omnipresent on 9/15/2011, 10:05 PM

    Really good work. Would love a blog post breaking down how you went on doing everything.

  • by JoshTriplett on 9/15/2011, 10:40 PM

    Looks impressive. Planning to support logging in and commenting/voting?

  • by sktrdie on 9/16/2011, 8:21 AM

    I especially like the textual version of the link. This will be helpful on my mobile device, where I pay for connectivity, loading only what is important is great.

  • by ga2arch on 9/16/2011, 1:01 AM

    you could try use my hn scraper written in python to overcome the api errors.

    https://github.com/ga2arch/py-hackernews/blob/master/hn.py ( it's not good code, but it does its job, i have successfully run it for 48+ hours with no crash ( at least the previous revision :D ))

    if you need help just send me an email =)

    Awesome work =)

  • by thoradam on 9/15/2011, 10:06 PM

    Works great in the stock Android browser, but it's stuck on "Loading" in Opera on Android. Then again . . Opera on Android seems to mess up every other site.

  • by bobbywilson0 on 9/16/2011, 1:53 AM

    I like this better than both of the native apps I have tried for android. Not only is it a more intuitive UI for me it is also very snappy. Good work.

  • by windexh8er on 9/16/2011, 5:33 AM

    Awesome UI! Was working great and then the API errors started in. This easily replaces all of the crappy Android apps for HN.

  • by aDemoUzer on 9/16/2011, 1:40 AM

    My skin for HackerNews http://harpb.com/Hack3rNews/

  • by cantbecool on 9/15/2011, 11:42 PM

    Your site is similar to http://www.icombinator.net/

  • by mwsherman on 9/16/2011, 12:57 AM

    What are you using for the “Text” version? RSS or are you parsing the source HTML?

  • by on 9/15/2011, 9:08 PM

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  • by Raphael on 9/15/2011, 10:18 PM

    Great! Would you please make the Next Page button full width?

  • by budu3 on 9/16/2011, 6:24 AM

    Can I vote on stories?

  • by trusko on 9/15/2011, 9:40 PM

    Nice work. Thanks.

  • by sportsTAKES on 9/15/2011, 11:16 PM

    Outstanding -

  • by chinatechus on 9/16/2011, 6:01 AM

    amazing!