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Tell HN: HNdroid, Hacker News android client

176 points| gluegadget | 15 years ago |gluegadget.com | reply

.apk: http://gluegadget.com/hndroid/HNdroid.apk

Screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amir_mohammad/sets/72157624870942817/

86 comments

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[+] whalesalad|15 years ago|reply
Diggin' the app :) My OCD took over and couldn't stand having the simple HN icon in my launcher so I took the pleasure of making one :)

I did two variants. One is a bit more traditional, while the other matches the name of the app more.

V1: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon.png

V2: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon_variant_2...

In the spirit of open source, here is the PSD: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon.psd

By the way, I've never actually made a production Android app icon before so I don't know if you can just drop it in or not but enjoy :)

[+] nuclear_eclipse|15 years ago|reply
Best part is that if you use LauncherPro, you can edit the icon on your home screen to use one of these images instead of the one specified by the apk. :)
[+] chewbranca|15 years ago|reply
I honestly really like the transparency of the current icon. I can see the fish in my wallpaper aquarium swimming behind it.
[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
Here's the source code: http://github.com/amir/HNdroid

At the first I thought I'd better clean-up the code, fix some bugs, add features requested here, and add some comments before releasing the code, but I then thought it'd better to release the code as it's in the released build.

[+] cubny|15 years ago|reply
good decision. thanks.
[+] ctrager|15 years ago|reply
I concede defeat. gluegadget's app is better than mine: http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android...
[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
:(

It was a great source of inspiration though, thanks!

[+] AndrewHampton|15 years ago|reply
Thanks for developing the app, I've been using it for quite a while and really like it.

Just to be clear, does this mean you'll no longer be developing your app?

[+] moomba|15 years ago|reply
I was using your app for a long time. Helped pass the time I spent in lines and during boring meetings. I'll miss your great app as I move on to gluegadgets.
[+] instcode|15 years ago|reply
Your app icon still can beat up gluegadget's ;-). Anyway, thanks both for your works!
[+] jroid|15 years ago|reply
Great app. Can you please add a "Read later button", that will save it to Instapaper/ Read it later/ Delicious/ download to SD. (the option of where to save could be configurable). Thanks.
[+] nuclear_eclipse|15 years ago|reply
Even better would be to hook into the system's already existing Share intents, so that any app already on the phone set up to share information could be used to handle this. Eg, the Hard Copy app (excellent Instapaper app written by an HN member) hooks into that list, so I can save links to Instapaper from email, browser, etc.
[+] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
Any change one can get to see the source? I am not really happy installing stuff from random locations on the internet and give it my password (no offence, just a rule of tomb).
[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
Valid concern.

I'll release the code as soon as I found sometime cleaning up the code, and commenting it.

[+] dogas|15 years ago|reply
Leads to another discussion, should HN support openid login, via google or any other openid provider? That way I wouldn't have to remember yet another password.

If that were the case however, I have yet to see a mobile (iphone, android) app that does openid authentication nicely.

What would really be interesting is tying openid to a hardware identifier in a mobile phone...

[+] amackera|15 years ago|reply
Would be a fun community-driven open source project.
[+] sssparkkk|15 years ago|reply
Seems to work very well! Great job.

Btw, 'successfull login :)' should be spelled without the double 'll'.

Edit: on second thought, I'd really like to be able to see the amount of comments in the overview. And perhaps even a small visual difference between opened-before and never seen yet articles...

[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
Thanks for suggestions, I'll see if I can put the comments count somewhere in the layout.

And Sorry for the typo :(

[+] extension|15 years ago|reply
Humbly requesting OpenID support, and BTW here's how you do it:

Open a browser view to the login page, wait for the HN cookie to show up, then close the browser and use the cookie to scrape the site.

I have all this implemented in a client I was working on. I'll share the code if you're interested.

[+] Klonoar|15 years ago|reply
I'd personally be very interested in seeing this code.
[+] RyanMcGreal|15 years ago|reply
I'm commenting from inside the app. Nice, clean interface. My only suggestion is better error messaging. I tried to post a comment before logging in, but instead of warning me and/or providing the login form, it just looked as though the comment had posted successfully.
[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
My bad, as you see in Main activity you can't upvote when you're not logged in. I had to do this for Comments activity too (disabling Comment menu, and reply/upvote context menu).
[+] derwiki|15 years ago|reply
Just what I've been waiting for :) Is the scraping/parsing done on in the app or on the remote end? (i.e., do I just have to count on HN being up for this to keep working?)
[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
It all happens in your phone, even Login. So your credentials are as safe as your web browser.
[+] camtarn|15 years ago|reply
Nice app! :) I think I'll end up using it if only because the upvote buttons on the HN website are so ridiculously fiddly to use on a mobile device...

One small quirk: I couldn't figure out how to upvote stories after logging in - I could see the menu entry to upvote comments, but there was no menu entry for upvoting on the main screen. Turned out I needed to manually refresh the main story list before it turned up.

[+] yock|15 years ago|reply
Have you submitted this to the Marketplace for the poor, helpless AT&T customers who cannot side-load apps?

--signed Poor Helpless AT&T Customer

[+] felideon|15 years ago|reply
You can enable side-loading in case you were wondering. Here are a few methods how, I personally used Method 4: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=738376

It's very well worth it---it's very convenient to just scan the QR code to the download link and install from the downloads folder, all from my phone. (Edit: be careful obviously, as others have mentioned.)

-- Non-helpless AT&T Customer

[+] Tichy|15 years ago|reply
He seems to be from Iran and therefore barred from the Marketplace (at least from the Google Marketplace).
[+] JangoSteve|15 years ago|reply
Cool app, this will be one of my new vices! I tried looking through the sourcecode to do it myself, but I'm not incredibly familiar with Android app structure or if maybe there's some convenient helper methods to do this in Android apps.

I was just wondering if you could maybe add the following to the comment text in the Comments view to render HTML elements like > (which should be >) and & (which should be &). Also, maybe do this:

  comment = comment.replace(/\*(.+)\*/,"<i>$1</i>")
Also, I noticed the comments view doesn't space out paragraphs or render preformatted text (inside the <pre> tags, which HN applies to lines that start with two spaces).
[+] buro9|15 years ago|reply
My desktop is orange, could you give your icon a solid background colour so that I can see it.
[+] Indyan|15 years ago|reply
Great work! I love the spartan interface. Btw, any chance of getting a prefetching option?
[+] chocolateboy|15 years ago|reply
Allow this application to:

    * read phone state and identity
No thanks.
[+] gluegadget|15 years ago|reply
It doesn't require to read your phone state, I forgot add a minimum SDK requirement, and Android adds that automatically for some compatibility reason.
[+] nuclear_eclipse|15 years ago|reply
I believe Android requires that for any sort of background syncing, so that the application will automatically stop checking whenever Background Data is disabled by the user (Airplane Mode, or manually unchecked in Settings). But then again, I could be wrong.
[+] enderwiggin|15 years ago|reply
Nice app, just one thing. If you press on an news item and it happens to take some time to load (due to low connection speed) the dialog box saying "Loading, Please wait..." is not cancelable (by pressing the Back button). It might be useful to enable this in one of the next updates.
[+] chewbranca|15 years ago|reply
working pretty well for me. I've been using hn reader but I like that this shows the scores. Makes it easier to filter.

Couple things. it appears to be using a non standard input form for comments as none of the typical android auto complete is working. i also tried making a few newlines buts it not showing up in here. also when youre on the comment thread and you hit comment and then flip the screen, it reloads the entire comment thread which is rather annoying on slow connections. otherwise working pretty well. (i stopped manually fixing the things auto omplete normally handles for emphasis. ie 'i' instead of 'I' and youre)

Update from laptop: newlines apparently work but don't show up in the comment box. Auto complete and reloading the comment thread are still issues though.

[+] ajju|15 years ago|reply
On the HTC Evo running 2.2, the app loads ok but crashes when I click on an individual story.
[+] jdrock|15 years ago|reply
Same for me. It also loads more slowly than going to the web page directly.