Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

Congrats, seems to work pretty well. I can tell you why I won&#x27;t be switching away from Minihack [1], though.<p>First, apparently there is no collapsing support. Secondly, and more importantly, that default font. Not a fan. It&#x27;s super thin, tiny, and you can&#x27;t adjust the text size. Apparently there are &quot;pro&quot; themes, but you force the user to buy without giving a preview of what you&#x27;ll be getting. Thirdly, no night mode; Minihack&#x27;s is really pleasant.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;minihack-for-hacker-news&#x2F;id631108846?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;minihack-for-hacker-news&#x2F;id6...</a>

Maker here. Just a fun note. One of the hardest parts about making the app was getting enough karma so we could test downvoting.

Just downloaded, seems really polished and looks beautiful.<p>I&#x27;m currently a user of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.premii.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.premii.com</a>, I&#x27;d make the switch to your app if you can get the &#x27;yesterday&#x27;s best&#x27; page, and an option to have readability mode on by default.<p>Very promising though, out of interest how long have you spent on the project?

This app is really nice and well designed but I think I&#x27;ll stick with &quot;Hacker News (YC)&quot; by Dharmesh Patel. Here is why:<p>- Your font looks really cool but I can&#x27;t read it for a long period of time. Could you add an option to adjust the font size (I know I can change that in the iOS settings but when I do that, all the text is bigger and this distracts me. I only need big text for long reading sessions). Hacker News offers that in the settings.<p>- I really would like to test out your pro themes, but I don&#x27;t want to pay the full price for testing it. How about you let us use all these themes for the top story (i.e. only for one story). If I like the themes, I&#x27;ll buy pro because I want to have it for all stories. This is better then a preview text.<p>- I really like Hacker News&#x27; &quot;Content read&quot; (I don&#x27;t know how to call it). Instead of opening the full HTML page, it only shows me the content of the page – without any distracting CSS fonts, ads, or banners that block the content. It is extremely helpful for pages that are not optimized for mobile and for pages that need 2 clicks to get to the content (for example github requires me to click &quot;View all of README&quot; although all I wanna do is read the readme. The HackerNews app takes care of that for me. It also loads the content when I&#x27;m in the underground train or in school incredible fast. I only have edge internet there and a full HTML page with all assets takes over a minute to load.

It&#x27;s great to see another app for HN that allows posting.<p>I used to use Hacker News (YC) by Dharmesh Patel and was very happy with it but it is read only. I tried news:yc which claims to support posting but that never worked. I submitted a bug report but never heard back.<p>I use MiniHack by Cai GuangShao for reading, voting and posting now. It works really well and I&#x27;m very happy with it. A while ago I reported a small bug and it was fixed immediately.<p>What can I do with Akepa that I can&#x27;t do with MiniHack? Why should I switch?

Since the official API (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;HackerNews&#x2F;API" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;HackerNews&#x2F;API</a>) does not support authentication, how are you collecting and storing auth credentials for login&#x2F;posting?

Love it, nice work!<p>Feature request: be able to collapse comment threads (on the AlienBlue reddit app it&#x27;s swipe left to collapse, swipe right to re-expand, but any mechanism would be greatly appreciated).<p>Another very minor (and AlienBlue-inspired) request: since you can swipe left from a comment page to go back to the article, it would make sense to be able to swipe right to navigate from the article over to the comment thread.<p>Thanks for putting this fantastic app out there, best of luck!

Found a bug in the app that allowed me to get the pro version without paying. Email is in my profile if you want to chat. Would prefer to not make it public info :)

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackerwebapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackerwebapp.com&#x2F;</a>

Just attempted to go Pro ($5? Of course! Quality work should be rewarded). As soon as the purchase was complete, the app said it couldn&#x27;t verify the purchase and to try again at a later time.

Android?

Excellent, excellent. Does it phone home?<p>That is, does it connect strictly to the HN and only websites explicitly opened by the user? Or does it talk to something else on the Internet behind user&#x27;s back?

looks like the icon is morse code for &quot;akepa&quot;

Looks great. One thing I loved about HackerNode was the fact that I could send an article to Chrome. (Maybe I&#x27;m blind, but I can&#x27;t figure out how to add Chrome to the iOS 8 activities sheet.) The in-app browser is nice, but this is an important feature for history-diving purposes. I&#x27;m sure lots of your target market don&#x27;t use Safari on the desktop. Any plans to support it?

I have used HackerNode for the longest time. It has some weird UI elements but for some reason I like the way it uses the screen space, all the other seem to involve a lot of scrolling (more than I personally want)<p>Sadly recently HackerNode&#x27;s comment section broke and none of the ASK HN type posts render any more. So I guess what I&#x27;m saying is, I&#x27;ll give it a go :-)

I like the app: the UI is amazing! I hope to see some technical posts about Swift on the Snappymob blog.<p>I have a small suggestion. I think the homepage copy would work better if you edited some of the clichés: &quot;Make the app your own&quot; and &quot;Let Your Voice Be Heard&quot; could be improved, for example.

For those of you not on iOS 8 like me, here&#x27;s another nice client : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;hacker-news-yc&#x2F;id713733435?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;hacker-news-yc&#x2F;id713733435?m...</a>

It would be sufficient if HN finally added responsive CSS. Grant me access and I do it for you.

Nice app. Personally, I am pretty happy with yohackernews for mobile. One thing I&#x27;d like to know more about though is Akepa&#x27;s icon &#x2F; logo. It&#x27;s very cool. I would love to read about your design process &amp; ideation.

Looks really clean, beautiful, well thought out and designed. Keep up the good work!

Just paid for pro, and up voting&#x2F; commenting from inside. I don&#x27;t even care if I&#x27;m giving you my authentication creds. So gud!

This is really beautiful - you should be proud of your work!<p>Feature request: please let me make the font smaller (and perhaps change the typeface?).

Sold. iOS dev myself, and I love the interactions. Commenting with the app now.<p>First feature request: enable readability by default in settings.<p>Cheers!

I like the work, but whats up with the taste analogies in your app&#x27;s description (i.e. Delicious UI)?

I would pay for this if it came with a browser plugin that synced my already-viewed links between devices

Looks beautiful, disappointed it&#x27;s iOS focused and there&#x27;s no Android version.<p>Either way, good job.

Question: how do you get to a list of your comments &#x2F; submissions?

Finally!!!! Thanks for this!!! Just downloaded and purchased the pro!