Hello HN,<p>I'm thrilled to announce the launch of my first app, Hazumi, a Hacker News reader, available for free on iOS!<p>I’ve been lurking on HN for around 2 years while working on this project seeing people post amazing HN reader apps of their own. I’ve always figured Hazumi wasn’t good enough yet to post here but if I wait around until I’m ready, I’ll probably never share so here goes…<p>Hazumi is a modern Hacker News app for your pocket with some intentional limitations.<p>Stories are displayed on a simple colourful card, with images, that condenses all the information you need at a glance. Out of the box you get accessibility features for system settings like light/dark mode and text size. Others are controlled in app for opening stories in a Web View vs externally via Safari, defaulting to Reader Mode and reducing animation bounciness.<p>You can browse top, new and best sections, limited to 30 stories each, which refresh every hour on the server. I’m not a fan of infinite scrolling or spending a lot of time reading news. I just want to get in and get out while keeping up on the latest.<p>Other notable features:
- Basic search
- Widgets for your Home and Lock Screen
- Apple Watch app
- Warns you of non-HTTPS links<p>There are a few “PRO” features that require a subscription ($/€1.99 monthly):
- AI summaries of comments on stories that have at least 30 root level comments
- In app newsletter (yesterday’s top 10 stories)
- Bookmarking with iCloud support
- Themes (change the colour of the cards)
- Supporting indie developers and keeping the lights on for Hazumi<p>Working on:
- Better comments/tappable links
- Enhancing search
- More themes<p>Being the first version, it's very early days for Hazumi and there are bugs that I’m working on fixing. I'm eager to improve it and shape its future based on your input. I welcome any feedback you may have, whether it's about existing features or ideas for new ones. Your thoughts will be instrumental in shaping Hazumi, making it an even more useful tool for tech news enthusiasts.<p>Please give it a try and let me know your thoughts.<p>P.S. Shout out to MB and MC for your awesome feedback during the TestFlight beta!
This looks great and I would love to try it but I have an iPhone 7 plus so can't install the required version of iOS - need to upgrade!<p>I currently use Octal but would switch and pay the subscription for an app that:<p>1) Highlights or lowlights comments I've already read. I think this is quite hard to do well though.<p>2) Allows me to hide stories I'm not interested in with a swipe.<p>3) Adds read later functionality - maybe an option available in the story screen. Currently, I favourite things I want to read and then unfavourite when I've finished but I realise that's probably not what the feature was intended for!<p>Bonus points for an offline mode! (as someone else mentioned)
Looks lovely, and the animations are beautiful.<p>If you’re looking for feature requests… long shot I know…. I’ve always wanted an HN app that has better offline support. I do most of my HN reading on the London Underground where there’s little phone signal and only wifi at stations.<p>The sort of things I’d love to see are: archiving the top stories and comments overnight so that no internet is required to view, loading both comments and stories at the same time, and not unloading one (requiring a re-request) when switching between them, or anything else that minimises the amount of networking required.<p>Otherwise, maybe more actionable feedback, the two taps to get into a story/comments feels unnecessary. As much as the animation is stunning, it feels like it’s slower to use than necessary.
Nice!
One thing: could you consider an option that avoids image previews? One thing I like about hacker news is that what I decide to explore is based solely on the entry’s headline.
Also, the app pulls pictures that are sometimes quite useless. E.g. it’s pretty annoying to se the arxiv logo repeated multiple times within a timeline.
Your app looks promising, I quite like the look and feel.<p>There are some low hanging UX improvements you could work on next: tapping on a story in the feed shows options to go to the comments or to the article, and I wish this could be done with a single tap.<p>Similarly, when reading comment threads it’s a bit annoying having to open replies one by one. For me, the best threaded discussion reader on iOS is Apollo which shows quite a few replies and goes more than 6 levels deep with indentation without having to tap anywhere.<p>I can already tell you that the default font size is going to be divisive, especially for readers of HN ;)<p>I’ll keep this app around and check the change logs to see if it could replace Octal, which I’m using now