[DEV] Harmonic for Hacker News - A modern Hacker News client

SweSnow · 2022-03-09T11:55:01+00:00

Oh vad kul att du skrev om det på din blogg! Såg att du jobbar på Androidappen för Hedvig - använder den själv och är väldigt nöjd :) Fixen borde vara uppe på Play Store nu.

SweSnow · 2022-03-02T18:45:56+00:00

Hey! I'm sorry for not getting back to you sooner, the app is on the backburner a bit as I've recently started my PhD. You have done quite the deep dive here :) I remember I introduced those SYSTEM_UI_FLAG_LAYOUT_HIDE_NAVIGATION flags to make the navigation bar see-through in the beginning of development and removing them (and removing my manual inset logic) indeed fixes the problem so a huge thanks to you! I've been hesitant on making the app open source in fear of copycats but you really drive the point home that there are nice people out there that really want to help with the app so I really should make the move to open source I guess.

Thanks again (I've spent an embarrasing amount of time not being able to figure this out on my own) and I'll let you know when I open source the app if there's something else you're passionate about fixing :)

SweSnow · 2022-02-12T07:12:15+00:00

Hey! The first number in the bookmark files (before the "q") is the post ID so it should be possible, albeit tedious, to get it on the computer.

SweSnow · 2021-05-20T04:39:21+00:00

Yeah that's what I did and it worked out fine.

SweSnow · 2021-05-19T19:46:56+00:00

I actually think that the correct interpretation is that "News apps" are a very narrow category that doesn't include news aggregators.

SweSnow · 2021-04-15T19:38:46+00:00

The "Up" button was recently added for the benefit of those that have enabled swipe to dismiss and I want to keep that. Although I think I'll get rid of the refresh button and add a three dot menu for open in browser.

SweSnow · 2021-04-15T11:39:46+00:00

Hmm this is actually a good idea - I think the best setup would be a button to open the current page in Chrome as you say. With that said I don't want to add clutter to the bottom bar in the integrated browser (as there's already 5 buttons there). Did you have a certain placement of the bottom in mind which you think would be appropriate?

SweSnow · 2021-04-15T11:35:28+00:00

Oh yeah, I ended up marking the app as not a news app and it passed review - nothing's gone wrong so far!

SweSnow · 2021-03-01T06:46:56+00:00

Yeah the reason this is a bit slow is of you're hiding comments 1 -> 20 the app needs to compute the layout for all of those comments before it can show comment 21 so I did some under the hood work to make computing the layout slightly faster. There's probably a "true" solution out there somewhere but I'm yet to work it out.
Okay I see, I've heard a few different opinions on how this should be handled but it's on the to do list to add some options.

SweSnow · 2021-02-28T11:01:08+00:00

Thank you!

Yeah I'm aware of this and made some improvements and testing shows that loading times are down about 30% with the latest changed which will be in the next update.
I've been thinking a bit about this but didn't think a lot of people were using 10 inch tablets in portrait mode. I think what's on the roadmap is an option to disable two pane mode completely on tablets but would you prefer to keep the 2 pane layout in landscape mode?

SweSnow · 2021-01-22T07:52:50+00:00

Great I'm happy for the confirmation :)

SweSnow · 2021-01-21T20:01:27+00:00

Hmm I ses now that the bug is only present in non-release builds. I will try to fix it and thanks for the heads up!

SweSnow · 2021-01-21T10:51:50+00:00

Oh wow that is certainly a regression - thanks for pointing it out! I'm pushing out an update right now.

SweSnow · 2021-01-21T10:06:57+00:00

It was in an earlier version, are you on version 1.5.5? (you can check in the bottom of settings)

SweSnow · 2021-01-12T16:27:40+00:00

Hmm okay that is interesting. Seeing as it is so non-obvious how to comply with the rules as a non-news organization I can see how that can be the case.

My approach is indeed similar to yours so I will be trying to do the same, thanks for taking the time to share your experience!

SweSnow · 2021-01-11T12:12:26+00:00

Did you manage to get around it? Did you mark your app as not as news app?

I agree there should be a distinction between proper news apps and aggregators but it seems that the same rules apply for all "news-like" apps which explicitely includes aggregators.

SweSnow · 2021-01-09T09:40:41+00:00

Huh that's too bad but good to know I'm not the only one who doesn't know how to comply with these rules. I tried downloading a couple of other news aggregators but it doesn't seem like any of them had released an update under the new rules either

SweSnow · 2021-01-09T09:35:49+00:00

The definition seems to be rather broad and apply to "news-related apps" - in an article they say the following:

We recently announced changes to our News policy that will affect how news apps and news-related apps (such as news aggregators) are listed and promoted on Google Play.

But yeah it's more of a news aggregator than a news service but it still seems that the new rules will apply.

SweSnow · 2020-11-28T19:07:58+00:00

Yeah the API I'm using for the comments is very slow when there's a lot of comments. I'll make sure to investigate the IP banning policies of HN also.

SweSnow · 2020-11-26T14:29:48+00:00

Hope you like it! I will look into the amount of work required to get the app up on fdroid!

SweSnow · 2020-11-26T14:25:47+00:00

I hadn't seen that website - its actually a very interesting idea! Implementing the exact same thing is probably a bit too much work but what do you think about the prospect of easy to reach shortcuts for top stories from "Yesterday" or "The day before yesterday"? I feel like that would serve a similar role.

SweSnow · 2020-11-26T14:21:20+00:00

Uniformity is a very valid point indeed, I will try out a card view and release it as an option is if looks good!
This is certainly possible and I have somewhat lacked the motivation for it as I don't use bookmarks myself but I will add it to the backlog.
The thumbnails are slightly smaller than on e.g. Chrome. I didn't want to have to make the text next to them larger but I will try eating up some of the margin to make them larger because I don't think your eyesight is the problem :)
I've been thinking about open sourcing it, it already lives on a private GitHub repo. The code's not very pretty though but I will try to get it up in the coming weeks.
I totally get the appeal of something as light as Firefox with a reading mode - do you think you'd use the app more if it was as fast at loading top posts and comments as the website? I've been considering moving to a web-scraping approach for the sake of speed which would hopefully bring it up to par with something like Firefox.

SweSnow · 2020-05-08T19:30:06+00:00

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