news:yc (iPhone HN client) finally accepted into the App Store

I've just happily paid for this app (congrats, nice app and makes my daily life easier/better)<p>I am always amused when people complain about paying $5 for an app like this.<p>Let's assume for a second that you are an IT/Internet professional, and you are read HN enough that you'd consider downloading an app. Maybe I am the exception, but I perhaps spend 30 mins per day on HN on my iphone. HN for me is great over breakfast, sitting on a train, lying in bed, taking a dump reading. The web experience on the iphone isn't great, and posting is hard, and lots of finger pinching. This makes that better.<p>Now lets do some rough maths. 30 mins per day, 365 days a year = a lot of hours (182.5 pa)<p>$5 = what an engineer earning US$100k for (220 days @ 8 hours/day earns in in 5 minutes (pre-tax). I've spent longer than that writing this post.<p>Obviously HN is international, salaries in some parts of the world are somewhat lower, but for those people in countries where iphones exist, and they own one, $5 is hardly that much.<p>The guy has even given away the source for free, if you would rather download it, and build it yourself.

From the page [emphasis mine]<p>&#62; Why does news:yc cost $4.99? Isn't that too much for something already available online? Yes, it probably is. This is my first app in the App Store. I've never done this kind of pricing before, and I probably got it wrong. However, I do want to make sure anyone who wants to use news:yc can: <i>feel free to build it from source or pirate it if you don't want to pay</i>.<p>Love this. I really wish this candor was the rule, not the exception. I'm buying the app right away.

People are complaining about $5? Really? Someone has put months of effort into this app, more than justifying the "high" price. If you think it's too expensive, just don't buy it.<p>I just bought it and think it's great (nice icon too).

It's a well made app, good job. Do keep us posted on how the price point worked out for sales.<p>Here are some suggestions:<p>1. It would be great to have an option when opening an article to automatically apply Readability when it loads (maybe you can choose that option by long-touching the title of the article or something). This would reduce waiting time on reading the article.<p>2. An article queue would improve multitasking. If the user could select a bunch of articles and have them load in the background, that would be awesome.<p>3. A setting to show the full text of every comment in the list view of all comments. I don't want to have to click a comment to read it fully, and I don't have to do that on the HN website.<p>Good luck!

Reading the default HN website from my iPhone sucks (small voting arrows, table layout doesn't degrade gracefully to a small screen, etc.) I'm glad to see that you stepped up to the plate and solved a problem that many of us have experienced. I'm more than happy to shoot you $5 for your solution.<p>I do UI/UX work and would love to point out a few quirks I've noticed if you're interested. You can find my email in my profile.<p>By the way, releasing the source code was a classy move!

Niche product for niche audience therefore keep the price high, if you reduce to 0.99 you will have to sell 4 times as many. As the niche audience has had the source code made available to them they can compile it for themselves if they require!

Interesting thought - since this is released with a BSD style license [1], couldn't someone else theoretically submit it to the Apple store at a lower cost?<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/raw/HEAD/LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/raw/HEAD/LICENSE</a>

Cheers. A tweetie-esque HN app is a great idea. I'll gladly put down $5 to help keep a promising high-schooler motivated and building cool stuff. Shame on you guys for trying to pressure him to change his price. And I like you're approach of "well it's $5 in the app store but here's the source if you want to build it, fork it, and/or install it yourself for free." Jason Fried would be proud of your pricing (ha!). Keep building. Good luck. #downloaded

Well done, there's a lot other hackers can learn from this:<p>1. Release it - too many programmers have a half-baked idea, or end up with a half-baked implementation. They start out all fired up, but don't have the stamina to see the product released to market.<p>2. Building stuff is great for job hunting. I can almost guarantee that this guy will get an internship out of this. He clearly has two features in great demand: programming ability, and gets stuff done. This product is far more attractive than a resume full of IT buzzwords. As long as he's not a prick in the interview, he'll get hired.<p>3. Focus your product on a niche. This minimises the work needed to get to market, and makes it easy to position your product as number one in the eyes of your potential customer. I haven't installed this app, but I bet it is better - and seen to be better - than any other app for browsing Hacker News (Safari included).<p>4. Charge a price for your product. This is where the rubber meets the road, where you discover that software development is much more than programming. Ignore the people wanting it for free and cater to those willing to pay. Play around and see how price changes affect revenue. Even if you later decide to make it free, a product that goes from $5 to zero 'feels' like a better product than something that started out free - classic 'anchoring' psychology.

Thanks for making the source code available (<a href="https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/</a>)!

Congrats! You had similar logic to why I made an App specifically to read HN on the iPad. It's very odd that you initially had trouble getting it accepted, as mine didn't have an issue at all with the initial version. With more screen space on the iPad, I opted to leave mine free with an adbar. I'll probably provide iAP to remove the ads enough people end up interested in it.<p>(If you're interested, mine is at: <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/app/hacker-news-padreader/id428331410?mt=8" rel="nofollow">http://itunes.apple.com/app/hacker-news-padreader/id42833141...</a>)

There will always be people who think your app should be cheaper or free. How many of them will write their own app and sell it for less? How many will put in the same number of hours of work and give it away?<p>My message to them is to pay or don't pay, but stop with the whining masquerading as "advice." If someone has a strong opinion about why the author will make more money at a lower price, they should walk their talk and <i>write their own damn software.</i>

Points are currently prioritized over replies, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that points are private and you're not displaying the contents of a threaded comment in the root article display page. Seems like those two things (points and replies) should be switched, and more attention should be paid to letting the user know a comment has replies.<p>Good start though, I've been enjoying browsing HN on it since seeing the news go up.

Wish there were an iPad version of this... Hacker News HD crashes a lot on mine, and I'd be willing to pay $4.99 for a nice interface with cacheing.

Wow what a lot of complaining. App developers are free to charge what they want and users are free to purchase or not. You would think that the readers of a site as focused on entrepreneurs as HN is, would realize that.<p>Very few apps in the App Store are also available open source on Github. I'm buying it just because of that and I hope the developer keeps working on it.

I love the app and idea...but I log-on with my OpenId (Google email).<p>Does the app support me logging in like that? I remember it didn't when we looked at beta screenshots a few weeks/months back.<p>Looking great otherwise though!

As a high school student (well, graduate tomorrow!) who is interested in designing mobile applications, I would really be interested in reading about your experience building this app. Not only the design and code, but the release and launch, if you don't mind.<p>I just bought the app and it's great! Keep up the good work!<p>EDIT: Just one little quirk I've noticed. The comment test is really small (I'm visually impaired and already hold the phone a few inches from my face). While I can read it, could you give us an option to increase it at some point in the future?

I don't like it; I'll be sticking with Michael Grinich's "Hacker News", although it has plenty of faults too. In particular: * I don't like the threading. * I don't like the partial view of the comments.

Just bought it. Checking it out.<p>I want push notifications for replies, though :). Premium feature? Could make something to poll myself but I'm cool with spending a few monies for it.

You should consider taking donations. It'd be a good way for people that can build it themselves to show their appreciation without having to give 30% to Apple.

Nice work - just installed it. I would sorta agree with everybody else and say lower the price - $1 or $2 is "dont even think about the price" range whereas atm seems most of the conversation is about the price being high<p>Edit: thanks for putting the code up. let us all know how this works out in terms of numbers etc. if you can

I can read HN on all mobile devices with a web browser. What value does a platform specific app provide?

I would love a send to readability function (read later.) Other then that it's great! It's so nice when readability view is integrated into applications meant for reading things. Reeder did this and I love it—it's even more useful on the Reeder mac app.

One thing that's a required feature for me is the "show more" feature.<p>I don't get to read enough and I only get bursts to consume and I need more than the default number of displayed links.

Fantastic. I do 90% of my hacker news reading from a mobile. Can't stress how worth $5 this app was for me. Nice job! And thanks also for releasing it under the free BSD license too.

Using it now. $5 well spent. Great job on this - very intuitive and clean. Very impressive at such a young age - you should have your pick of internship opportunities!

I'm using it right now and I like it a lot.<p>Instapaper integration is handy, but I'd like to be able to bookmark conversations, so I can go back and see new comments.

Live it. Posting from the app now in fact. Only suggestion so far is to include rotation support. Sort of a pain being portrait only, many people like landscape mode.

Will it support comment scores[1]? :D<p>[1]<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568453" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568453</a>

Has anyone used this app as well as Michael Grinich's app (I'm posting from that) and iHackerNews.com in Mobile Safari? Which do you prefer?

I'm not sure if its true but one of the commenters said the creator is in high school. What resources did you use learning Objective C?

This is a really polished app. I've noticed a lot of the other hacker news readers in the app store lack features or have weird UI

Exactly what I was looking for. Nothing more, nothing less. Beautiful work. The readability add-on was an unexpected gem.

This is great. would totally pay for this. and I love love love that you put your source code up. Open source is so cool.

Love the app but I'm dying for sharing features in an HN app. Please add Facebook and Twitter support.

I used this when it was in beta, and it's really really nice. I can't wait for iPad support!

Another one? I have 3 iPhone HN clients already.<p>What's your unique value proposition?

Feature request: full size comments (not short preview) and nested comments.

I'm glad they approved the app. I just bought it and it's fantastic.

I would have bought it if it were $1.99. Just a data point for you.

Well worth the money, loving the RIL support :)

how is it in comparison to the mobile web site<p><a href="http://ihackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ihackernews.com/</a>

Cool app, please honor newlines in quoted text

curious, how many downloads have you got so far?

Not for $5. Opera Mini gives me the same thing for free.

4.99 ????

A suggestion:<p>Have you seen the tweetbot app (<a href="http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/" rel="nofollow">http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/</a>)? A recommended download. Swipe left, Swipe right on a tweet perform actions. This sort of thing is perfect for this app.<p>Swipe left: Comments<p>Swipe right: Article in browser<p>Double click article: Read Later in Instapaper<p>Great app, and congrats. First time I've taken the plunge on an iOS HN app, and not disappointed so far (a little afraid though, due to potential drop in productivity).

ihackernews.com by HN'er ronnier works very well for reading HackerNews on a mobile, although it seems that voting has been borked recently due to some log on discrepancies. Why pg doesn't have a simple mobile version is mind boggling.

Free Vs. Paid (Iphone)HN Access? I dont think its fair for people to Poo-Poo on outcries of making it free. To be fair, HN now is freely accessible, and a part of me cringes at the notion of charging folks for an "iphone-wrapper" (pardon the term) to free HN community content.<p>Though, it is commendable that great effort has been put forth by the developer/mastermind of the app -- and certainly that should also be rewarded. (cool points for putting it on GitHub)<p>Perhaps, something in between? <i>Tip Jar</i>; or KickStarter or Ads? I dont know. <i></i>It would be interesting to see what kind of revenue and overall reception the app and developer gets! (would love to see a 'post-launch' write up)

Requires iOS 4.0 or later. [edit: Is this untrue?]

I own an Android phone and I have a Hacker news App made by Ronnie Roller which is ad free.<p>Is this news-yc Iphone app in anyways different from the one I have installed as far as the features go? Just curious...<p>Also the ronnieroller Android app gets installed in phone harddrive instead of sdcard. Though it only takes uo 200KB, I cant move it for some reason, I dont really like that. There are other apps for HN on android market which I need to check.

5 bucks ??? What's the value-add? Also why is there no iPad version? (replying from an iPad btw)

The audience for this is ... us? I'm dismayed at the idea HN readers are voluntarily choosing this hostile platform for <i>their own</i> use, rather than merely holding their nose and developing for hapless consumers, while personally using a platform that <i>likes</i> hackers.

Charging $5 for HN app - that's giving back to the community? Don't think so. Quite much just for a different interface.