cheeaun / hackerweb-native-2

HackerWeb 2: A read-only Hacker News client.

HackerWeb 2

A read-only Hacker News client.

HackerWeb is a super-clean Hacker News app built for maximum readability and has a lean set of features to optimize the reading experience.

It’s created specifically with iOS design guidelines in mind, so it feels native and blends well with the operating system.

It has a simple set of features that are usually invisible:

• Dual Web and Comments tabs for easy switching between the story’s web page and the list of comments
• Revolutionary comments thread UI for easy navigation, with smart collapsing to prevent being overwhelmed by too many comments
• Automatic Dark mode, respecting the system’s appearance settings.
• Smart indentations and formatting for comments, complementing the existing limited formatting from Hacker News.
• Automatic syntax highlighting for code blocks in comments, with best-effort programming language detection.
• Allow interactions like upvoting and replying, which opens up web view with login information and sessions stored in itself, instead of the app.
• Comment’s “Thread view” to list all parent comments of a comment, on a flat list, for easy reading instead of manually drilling down the nested comments.
• “Share as Image” for comments, which allows sharing of a specific comment, optionally including the parent comments and/or story, as an image.

HackerWeb is an unofficial Hacker News client, built with React Native and Expo.

This is a passion side project for learning and experimenting ideas. Since 2012.

Also a complete rewrite of the first version launched in 2016.

• V1: https://github.com/cheeaun/hackerweb-native
• Story: http://cheeaun.com/blog/2016/03/building-hackerweb-ios/

Download

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1084209377
• TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PHcLooxC

Preview

Light

Dark

Development

This is built with Expo under the Managed Workflow. Currently using SDK 45 and targeted only for iOS (for now).

npm install -g expo-cli

After cloning this repository:

cd hackerweb-native-2
npm i
npm start

Resources

• API:
  • node-hnapi
  • HN Search API (Algolia)
  • Official API (Firebase)
• Icons from SF Symbols
• Awesome Hacker News

License

• MIT.
• Not affiliated with Hacker News or YCombinator.

hackerweb-native-2's Issues

Reader mode

It would be great if there was a way to turn on reader mode on websites that support it (and possibly a setting for it to turn on automatically)

Feed doesn’t update

New app looks really great, thanks for making this.

I've noticed that since the feed updated the first time after the update it doesn't refresh its content anymore and shows a stale feed:

(Using version 2.0.0 (9))

Wrapping pre quotes for readability

On recent discussion, https://hackerweb.app/#/item/33512338
contrast the readability of the native hackernews quote

with the readability of the hackerweb quote.

Light loading screen in dark mode

There is no dark mode version for the loading screen

Result comparison with EAS Build

Hi there!

I saw your post on Reddit and the concern about app size. I thought I'd use this as an example to try out the new EAS Build preview and the early support it has for managed workflow.

The app worked with EAS Build without any changes required (beyond creating eas.json when running eas build), and the install size was reduced to ~6.7mb on my iPhone 11 Pro, down from 52.6mb reported from the App Store for the expo build version of the app.

Here's a screenshot of the build info in App Store Connect, and a video of the result (mostly indistinguishable from the source, I just renamed the app and you'll notice in the settings there is no Expo SDK version present in the build).

RPReplay_Final1608663895.mp4

---

Basically what EAS Build does for managed projects is "eject" the project, configure everything based on your app config and installed packages, then set up the credentials and run a build with fastlane gym.

This took about 11 minutes (after brief queuing):

If you want free early access to this so you can try it out and give feedback, just DM me on Twitter @notbrent and let me know what your Expo username is and I can add you :)

(we'll have a free tier that should be more than enough for hobby/open source apps like this when we launch General Availability)

App crash on item click

App crashes when trying to view the page or comments for the hacker news article below which is currently item 2 on HN.

All other articles and comments in the list are working without issue.

Device: iPhone X
iOS version: 14.6

https://www.codevoid.net/ruminations/2021/06/20/wwdc-2021-apple-metaverse-plain-sight.html