Hello, I’m the developer. Didn’t expect a Show HN post to go into a second—chance pool — I woke up an hour ago to find that my app was trending on HN.<p>I developed this b.c. I found that I didn’t like HN mixed with other work/school related tabs, and realized that a separate app would be great for me. I believe that apps should use the most native-like UI possible — especially Cocoa on macOS, so I aimed to be the most ‘Mac-assed’ HN client possible.<p>Unfortunately the current app is in fact pretty unpolished — it’s in a usable state, but there’s a lot of missing features that one would expect from a ‘full-featured’ HN client. Probably a bunch of unknown bugs as well :-(. I would very appreciate any suggestions on feature additions or simple bug reports. Thanks!
Does the Algolia hackernews api ( the specific API this client uses ) still require you to query in a tree like fashion, every comment item id if you want an entire page of comments?<p>Its extremely inefficient, to the point where I have a better time curling the HN web page and piping it through python beautifulsoup<p>Regarding a native app vs the using the HN website. The HN website I think is pretty ideal for the type of content its displaying, a native app doesn't give you much over having a HN tab open. I guess only if you want to read HN but not have a web browser open? But how often does that happen?<p>The only benefit I see from a native app ( and why I use one on Android ) is the ability to save articles and comments for offline reading, say, when I get on a plane.
Thanks for sharing this. It looks really great and pretty minimal which I personally love. The main thing I'm missing from this would be read/unread indicators on stories.<p>A roadmap of planned features would be nice or some tickets that other people could help with.<p>I'm not sure how much time you plan on spending this, but I'd personally probably be willing to buy a version of this if it was able to do notifications on replies and similar features hn lurkers might want. Other interesting paid features could be read-later list, favourites, cross device syncing of read indicators and lists, etc. If you don't wanna deal with paid features maybe consider enabling the github sponsor feature so people could optionally pitch-in.
This is great! I built a native. macOS client that I actually sold in the AppStore a while ago. It did everything was native except rendering of the article but I was just using plain web view for that part. The pain was keeping but synced with changes on HN. I still have a personal build that I use on a daily basis.<p>I still have the landing page up which warning, looks awful on mobile <a href="https://mackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mackernews.com/</a><p>But congrats! I stopped selling my client and it’s starting to show age for my personal use too. Will check this out. Do you have voting and commenting working? That’s one thing I miss the most that stopped working on my client.
Very happy to see a "mac-assed" app!<p>My only complaint so far is that I can only see about 12 items in the app on one screen, vs the whole front page in a browser. Adds a lot more scrolling.
This raises a question I've always wondered:<p>How many of you prefer to run a native app rather than the web app?<p>Personally I hate installing things on my desktop if there is a website because it is just another thing I have to manage. (Even more so because I have multiple Windows, Mac and Linux boxes I'm bouncing around between during the day and rather just have sync'd Firefox bookmarks than have to install s/w on each box.)<p>Am I in the minority, majority, both, neither?
Looks good but needs text zoom (cmd =/+ and cmd -).<p>I'd also consider the sidebar include 'My Posts' and 'My Comments'. Maybe it has those, but I couldn't tell, as I turned off outgoing network access to firebase before logging in just to be on the safe side. Any reason you're connecting to firebase rather than storing preferences locally? I'm worried about my HN credentials being stolen.
On my "projects to do when I have lots more free time" list is to make a Hacker News NNTP server. Read only, of course. Few details to work out (edits, polls, making comments, etc) but I think it could work. It would solve the "what's new in this thread" problem.
Excellent work! I really like the UI. I've been using some iOS app for HN because the UI offers easy and quick swipe-based upvotes and bookmarking. But your UI is more reminiscent of a mail app and that's better suited for a desktop app. So kudos!
Looks nice. More screenshots would be appreciated...for example, how it displays italics, indented text "code blocks", the limited amount of emoji/utf-8 supported on HN, etc.