1. I can't sync vote status so it's only a best effort at the moment to let you vote. Of course after the 1st vote is recorded subsequent votes will not count. This for sure can be improved.
2. Sure. I added vibration because I tend to mis-swipe so I added vibration to give me some feedback. But I understand not all users may like it.
No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature.
I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable.
3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice if you choose 'Remember my choice'. I don't know what went wrong here as it is a platform feature and out of my control :(
I found it very useful and really liked it, just these problems were so irritating I dropped it again. I'm hoping you can fix this, because I have trouble with reading HN on a browser, with its tiny font size.
I suspect you've got a bug with the deep link feature because other apps only show this menu one time. Yours shows it over and over.
While we're talking, I also found the UI rather busy with stuff that seems unnecessary. Half the fun with HN is its simplicity. If you ever get the urge, think about doing an Apple and removing stuff that people don't use.
Nice work, anyhow, and thanks for that. Consider making a paid version of the app with no differences, except you get some money back from it.
Thanks! Would be helpful if you can share your device info so I can try to reproduce that issue. If you still keep the app around you can just send an in-app feedback and it will automatically include such info. Or you can reply here. Or if you can email me, my email should be available on Play Store listing.
No, I don't think you can fix the 'remember choice' feature. Practically all apps ask me for that when I click on a domain I haven't clicked on before. 'Remember' will only remember the choice for that domain.
You're correct. Saved/bookmarked stories have been there way before HN has favorite. I'm thinking of syncing these two, but it's not very straightforward without API support.
Appreciate the effort. Ive had lots of issues with other open source HN apps. This one looks and works great so far. Would've loved an fdroid release, but an open app with github releases is more than can be said about most other apps, so no real complaint there.
Disable card view (which is the default for new installations) + choose smaller text size would achieve more or less the same. I have already gone thru few iterations of compacting the UI and I'm afraid I can't squeeze it anymore :(
Thanks for the reply. I really like the "comment search" feature in Relay based on time (show and jump through comments added in last X minutes), words (jump through comments that contain certain words), jump to comments based on author (OP, me), etc. There are many more comment search parameters, but these are my favorite.
I already have similar request in my backlog. This is gonna be tricky, because I don't have all comments up front as they are loaded on demand (even for saved comments - loaded on demand from cache).
I have something similar in mind but haven't get started yet. It can be done via HN API, but it can only be done at regular interval (polling), as I don't use Firebase but raw web API.
Not op but I use both Relay and Materialistic and I find myself swiping from the left to get back to the main page after reading the comments (muscle memory after using Relay for a long time). It would be great if you could incorporate this into your app. Either way, its a great app!
It's because stories/comments are loaded on demand. If you never scroll to it it won't be loaded. It was designed this way partly due to how HN API works, which doesn't provide all data up front.
Alternatively app can aggressively load everything up front, which is slow; or paginate content. To me it tends to feel faster when u have progressive UI change (empty card then fill it) than abrupt change (completely empty then all items appear), so I decided not to paginate.
I used another app called HN before yours. It did not have this problem. TBH I'd rather have it aggressively load all the content. It isn't that much data and the current experience is frankly jarring.
I also can't seem to figure out how to consistently jump to the next top level parent comment with the nav button. It seems to jump to other comments lower in the current thread which I'm trying to skip past. Am I missing something?
Overall love the app though. Love that I can click a user name and see their profile.
One other odd thing is when I open a HN Notify email link telling me I have a response, I can't figure out how to go up a level from the response comment to my parent comment they responded to in order to remind myself what I posted.
I already did some optimization to load 1 extra page of comments in advance, which I believe should improve the experience. I also tried the same trick for stories but got some janky issues that I need to figure out first.
Swipe down the button should go to next same level comment, or if none it goes to the next one, which is the 1st child.
User-related content support is quite limited at the moment as I need to crawl HN web for that.
Do you have any user data on whether people would prefer the downswiping went to the next comment at the same level, or the next parent regardless of if they are currently on a child?
My use case is that I'm scrolling and I get bored with a thread. It isn't much different to swipe up on the thread to scroll down further if I wanted to keep reading, and there is no easy way to just jump to the next top-level thread. I'm left either having to collapse several levels of comments to condense things, or scroll until I hope I find the next one and don't miss it.
At the very least, I feel like this should be configurable behavior for the button.
But again, this is just me, so you might have data saying people want otherwise, and this is free so I shouldn't complain :)
It's the 1st version of on-screen navigation so for sure there are rooms for improvement. I think of it as a D-pad, as in games, when you make selection with D-pad, down means selecting below item. I can make a toggle option to reverse scroll direction though.
This is great! Although, I'll shamefully admit that after just doing the Konami code and seeing nothing happen, I went so far as to take a look at the source to get the last step. :)
You did indeed get a 5-star review out of it, though :)
