Congrats and building and releasing something. I guess for reading things like this, I'm just a browser kind-of guy. But I still appreciate youre building a NATIVE app that's using around 85MB of working memory (according to my Activity Monotor), and not some Electron thing.
I'm probably just a anti-app guy, but I tried it out.
First thing I went to do was CMD-F to search for some strings in the comments section.
Actually, the real first thing I did, was click on the left-side article preview on the text that said "1 hr ago | 63 comments" thinking it'd navigate me to the comments. See, I like my native hyper-links.
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dev-ns8
Congrats on shipping!
Two things, does anyone else feel like 2017 was not 9 years ago and rather feels like it was just yesterday? I use a 2017 iMac running MacOS 13.7.8. It appears my hardware will not support any newer version of MacOS. For the most part, I haven't been too discouraged by this as I prefer older MacOS designs over the newer ones.
However, this is the second time in 2 days I've actually hit a wall in the Apple eco-system due to an older OS.
Last night I tried to build Ghostty to hack on a feature... it needs Xcode SDK 26 which isn't supported on Xcode 14 (latest version I'm able to install).
Now today, attempting to try this app out, I can't launch it due to being on too old of an OS.
It's really a shame because this iMac from 2017 is quite the capable machine. Absolutely no reason to upgrade it (from a hardware / performance standpoint).
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Aperocky
Tangential piggy back: If you prefer CLI, here's a free and open source HN browser in terminal:
First feature request from me would be to adjust text size. I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year. Getting old, y'know. But also, as someone pointed out on a design blogpost a decade ago, why not make things easier to read. I didnt need it then, but I appreciate it now.
Really happy that I can run this on MacOS14 cause I've been locked out of some neat things people have built recently. Thanks for targetting older OSes. I'm not upgrading to the crap they've been putting out lately.
I'll be able to read details more later (getting ready for the job). Hope I didn't miss anything and comment about something that was already addressed. Congrats on shipping!
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elcritch
> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.
You're not kidding! That's actually the first thing I looked at in your Github Repo. It's annoying as I made a neovim gui and downloaded it from GH and couldn't run my own app until I dug into some hidden place in the Settings App. Definitely super helpful to see how it's done.
I'm digging the app too! As another commenter said it'd be cool to see the comments as native SwiftUI elements as well. :)
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Octoth0rpe
> Built-in ad blocking — a precompiled WKContentRuleList blocks 14 major ad networks (DoubleClick, Google Syndication, Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon ads, etc.) right in the WebKit layer. No extensions needed. Toggleable in settings
This is a good start, but I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists. Hopefully less maintenance that way too.
I have been building a drop in replacement for SwiftUI that can render with different renderers (TUI for now and GTK/Adwaita very soon). This will be such an awesome demo use case for it.
Congratulations on getting this out!
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Brajeshwar
No No. Don’t do that, don’t make it better and easy to use. I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should. Now, this app that I can keep it open all day!
Btw, can you allow me to set the font-family, font-size, etc. for the interface? I can’t even do the default `CMD + +` to zoom in.
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jaequery
as a stand alone app, i thought there would be at least some kind of an improvement in UI but its like a step back.
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gwbas1c
If my work PC was a Mac I'd give it a try!
One thing: I really like the colors of Hacker News. It feels weird to me when Hacker News is presented in other colors. If I were to use your app I'd want to change the color pallet back to what it looks like on HN.
> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.
Yes, in a past life I shipped a Mac application. This aspect is always a little bit of black magic. I will say that the Windows installer situation was a lot worse, IMO.
lasgawe
THis is nice. Congrats on the launch!
WhitneyLand
Nice work.
I think you should remove Claude as a contributor to your repo. It probably weaseled its way in on its own, I think it’s the developers job to talk about the tools they used not the tool company.
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cadamsdotcom
Congrats on launching!
How is this superior to an RSS reader?
miloo94
Looks really neat! Before I built Hacksy for iOS, I also contemplated building a macOS version for HN news.
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jovantho
This is really good and I can definitely see myself using it instead of visiting the website.
One thing I think would make it even better is if the comments weren't a web-view/embed but used swiftUI to display them (similar to how some reddit clients look, for instance). Not sure how feasible that is, I can imagine it'd be more involved than the current implementation.
mojuba
I'm a big fan of Swift (and SwiftUI), such a concise and elegant language. Beauty.
Also I appreciate how you made all backend calls just static functions which they always should be. People tend to overcomplicate these things and add a lot of boiler plate and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Going to try your app, thank you!
P.S. tried it, already miss the `threads` tab
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morphle
Nice. I would like a way to export my own comments.
Thank you for the MIT license, I’ll be able to add my own.
It also works on my fork of the old news server.
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aquir
It is great! Very native feel and it's quick too. I don't have to keep a Safari window open all the time...the ram usage of this app is around 10% of a Safari window with a single tab.
A font size setting would be nice, I found the font is a bit small.
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NoSalt
Do we need this? I mean, isn't this what your browser is for?
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whh
This is so nice. The UX feels very smooth too - I love these kinds of native apps. Thank you!
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IFC_LLC
Ah, this gives me 2002 vibes where coolest websites started to produce native clients for their websites so their users could read and comment offline.
These tools have no sense on a highly chaning API which is the web. Email, Usenet and the like will have a fixed protocol for decades and will still work anywhere.
acquire9395
i would love keyboard-driven navigation! espeically for switching between the post and comments :)
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rickknowlton
crazy you built this thing in less than a week! did you use the claude code from CLI or via the macOS app to help with this? just kind of curious on your workflow!
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numbers
please add in the keyboard shortcuts to navigate, that's one of my favorite things about native desktop apps
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rcarmo
Nice. It is actually very close to the experience I have via RSS on Reeder.
aoyama1chome
What does your CLAUDE.md look like?
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yawniek
really nice, but if you have high res monitor the fonts are too small.
would be nice to zoom the ui
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wegoagain_dev
IOS next and you've nailed it!!
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latchkey
This is super cool.
In other similar news, I've been working on enhancing the HN ux, but still in the browser as an extension. The current build up on the Chrome store is pretty stable.
Some nice to haves: automatic paywall bypass for paid sites, and automatic cookie/pop-up rejection.
marxisttemp
Why does the comments page look like a web view with some custom CSS? Is it because HN API doesn’t have a way to post comments? You could try using a WebPage[1] to inject the cookies and post comments, and an OutlineGroup to display comments.
Congrats and building and releasing something. I guess for reading things like this, I'm just a browser kind-of guy. But I still appreciate youre building a NATIVE app that's using around 85MB of working memory (according to my Activity Monotor), and not some Electron thing.
I'm probably just a anti-app guy, but I tried it out.
First thing I went to do was CMD-F to search for some strings in the comments section.
Actually, the real first thing I did, was click on the left-side article preview on the text that said "1 hr ago | 63 comments" thinking it'd navigate me to the comments. See, I like my native hyper-links.
Congrats on shipping!
Two things, does anyone else feel like 2017 was not 9 years ago and rather feels like it was just yesterday? I use a 2017 iMac running MacOS 13.7.8. It appears my hardware will not support any newer version of MacOS. For the most part, I haven't been too discouraged by this as I prefer older MacOS designs over the newer ones.
However, this is the second time in 2 days I've actually hit a wall in the Apple eco-system due to an older OS.
Last night I tried to build Ghostty to hack on a feature... it needs Xcode SDK 26 which isn't supported on Xcode 14 (latest version I'm able to install).
Now today, attempting to try this app out, I can't launch it due to being on too old of an OS.
It's really a shame because this iMac from 2017 is quite the capable machine. Absolutely no reason to upgrade it (from a hardware / performance standpoint).
Tangential piggy back: If you prefer CLI, here's a free and open source HN browser in terminal:
https://github.com/Aperocky/hnterminal
Install: `pipx install hnterminal`
Very nice. Commenting from it right now.
First feature request from me would be to adjust text size. I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year. Getting old, y'know. But also, as someone pointed out on a design blogpost a decade ago, why not make things easier to read. I didnt need it then, but I appreciate it now.
Really happy that I can run this on MacOS14 cause I've been locked out of some neat things people have built recently. Thanks for targetting older OSes. I'm not upgrading to the crap they've been putting out lately.
I'll be able to read details more later (getting ready for the job). Hope I didn't miss anything and comment about something that was already addressed. Congrats on shipping!
> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.
You're not kidding! That's actually the first thing I looked at in your Github Repo. It's annoying as I made a neovim gui and downloaded it from GH and couldn't run my own app until I dug into some hidden place in the Settings App. Definitely super helpful to see how it's done.
I'm digging the app too! As another commenter said it'd be cool to see the comments as native SwiftUI elements as well. :)
> Built-in ad blocking — a precompiled WKContentRuleList blocks 14 major ad networks (DoubleClick, Google Syndication, Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon ads, etc.) right in the WebKit layer. No extensions needed. Toggleable in settings
This is a good start, but I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists. Hopefully less maintenance that way too.
Neat! One feature I'd love to see is to follow/block users. Like this Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-followblock/dkbn...
I have been building a drop in replacement for SwiftUI that can render with different renderers (TUI for now and GTK/Adwaita very soon). This will be such an awesome demo use case for it.
Congratulations on getting this out!
No No. Don’t do that, don’t make it better and easy to use. I’m already addicted and spent more time than I should. Now, this app that I can keep it open all day!
Btw, can you allow me to set the font-family, font-size, etc. for the interface? I can’t even do the default `CMD + +` to zoom in.
as a stand alone app, i thought there would be at least some kind of an improvement in UI but its like a step back.
If my work PC was a Mac I'd give it a try!
One thing: I really like the colors of Hacker News. It feels weird to me when Hacker News is presented in other colors. If I were to use your app I'd want to change the color pallet back to what it looks like on HN.
> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.
Yes, in a past life I shipped a Mac application. This aspect is always a little bit of black magic. I will say that the Windows installer situation was a lot worse, IMO.
THis is nice. Congrats on the launch!
Nice work.
I think you should remove Claude as a contributor to your repo. It probably weaseled its way in on its own, I think it’s the developers job to talk about the tools they used not the tool company.
Congrats on launching!
How is this superior to an RSS reader?
Looks really neat! Before I built Hacksy for iOS, I also contemplated building a macOS version for HN news.
This is really good and I can definitely see myself using it instead of visiting the website. One thing I think would make it even better is if the comments weren't a web-view/embed but used swiftUI to display them (similar to how some reddit clients look, for instance). Not sure how feasible that is, I can imagine it'd be more involved than the current implementation.
I'm a big fan of Swift (and SwiftUI), such a concise and elegant language. Beauty.
Also I appreciate how you made all backend calls just static functions which they always should be. People tend to overcomplicate these things and add a lot of boiler plate and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Going to try your app, thank you!
P.S. tried it, already miss the `threads` tab
Nice. I would like a way to export my own comments.
Thank you for the MIT license, I’ll be able to add my own.
It also works on my fork of the old news server.
It is great! Very native feel and it's quick too. I don't have to keep a Safari window open all the time...the ram usage of this app is around 10% of a Safari window with a single tab.
A font size setting would be nice, I found the font is a bit small.
Do we need this? I mean, isn't this what your browser is for?
This is so nice. The UX feels very smooth too - I love these kinds of native apps. Thank you!
Ah, this gives me 2002 vibes where coolest websites started to produce native clients for their websites so their users could read and comment offline.
This is sooo good.
Great! I was just looking for a replacement for https://www.modernhn.com
These tools have no sense on a highly chaning API which is the web. Email, Usenet and the like will have a fixed protocol for decades and will still work anywhere.
i would love keyboard-driven navigation! espeically for switching between the post and comments :)
crazy you built this thing in less than a week! did you use the claude code from CLI or via the macOS app to help with this? just kind of curious on your workflow!
please add in the keyboard shortcuts to navigate, that's one of my favorite things about native desktop apps
Nice. It is actually very close to the experience I have via RSS on Reeder.
What does your CLAUDE.md look like?
really nice, but if you have high res monitor the fonts are too small. would be nice to zoom the ui
IOS next and you've nailed it!!
This is super cool.
In other similar news, I've been working on enhancing the HN ux, but still in the browser as an extension. The current build up on the Chrome store is pretty stable.
https://oj-hn.com
Some nice to haves: automatic paywall bypass for paid sites, and automatic cookie/pop-up rejection.
Why does the comments page look like a web view with some custom CSS? Is it because HN API doesn’t have a way to post comments? You could try using a WebPage[1] to inject the cookies and post comments, and an OutlineGroup to display comments.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/webpage
After playing around with it for a bit, one request I would like to make is being able to open multiple tabs.
This is really really nice! Great work!
My only nitpick is I wish I could force dark mode on web pages with a light background, but that’s minor.
I mean, what's the point of this app? It looks exactly like the web version, without any improvements over the abysmal HN threading.
Looks nice but I don't have/want a Mac so I can't really use it. Support for other platforms would be nice.