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Show HN: Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility
I read HN on my phone every day and never really settled on a reader, so I
wrote my own and finally tidied it up enough to put out
there.
It's plain SwiftUI with no third-party dependencies. A few things I spent the
most time on:
Comments are parsed and drawn as native text instead of being dumped into a web
view. Links, italics, quotes and code blocks behave like the rest of the OS,
text selection works, and threads collapse instantly. The whole comment tree
comes back from the Algolia API in a single request, which felt a lot nicer than
walking the Firebase API node by node.
Accessibility. Nothing depends on color on its own, so
points, read state and selection all carry a shape or an icon too. VoiceOver
reads each story as one coherent element with proper actions, Dynamic Type and
Reduce Motion are respected, and there's a color-blind mode. The first-run setup
actually looks at your device's accessibility settings, switches on the matching
options, and tells you what it changed instead of making you hunt for them.
Then the usual things you'd expect: Top/New/Best/Ask/Show/Jobs, search, saved
stories, read tracking, an in-app reader, light and dark, and a handful of
accent colors.
It only talks to the public HN APIs, there's no account and nothing is tracked.
Source and screenshots are in the repo.
I'd most like feedback on the comment rendering and the accessibility choices,
since those were the parts I cared about getting right. Happy to answer anything
about how it's put together.
- Calgaryp 3mo agoJust starred it on github ;) Looks very good !
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- newdee 3mo agoLooks great, do you plan on publishing to the AppStore?
- sylwester 3mo agoIf it is possible and Apple accepts the app.
- gavinmckenzie 3mo agoWell done. As a colour blind person (and iOS developer) I am thrilled anytime an app doesn’t rely on colour cues alone. I’ve used Hack and Octal but I am going to give your app a try.
- ios-contractor 3mo agoLooks great. Does it support pinch zoom like webpage hn does
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo agoNeeding to resort to pinch and zoom for everything is an indicator of bad accessibility. HN “supporting” pinch and zoom is more like… HN not being responsive and/or being good about dynamic text size.
- ios-contractor 3mo agopinch and zoom doesn't really have to do with hn. All webpages support pinch and zoom. iOS-wide text enlargement isn't always a solution
- Tiberium 3mo ago[flagged]
- roger_ 3mo agoAny chance of HN getting angry about this, à la Reddit?
- rkagerer 3mo agoOk. I don't need or want this. Doesn't mean others can't find it useful. e.g. I bet some portion of users would appreciate Dark mode without resorting to CSS tweaks. /rant
- altairprime 3mo ago(Perhaps they meant as in Is This At Risk of the Apollo Apocalypse rather than as in behaving more like Reddit?)
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago* HN reader apps have existed forever. * There is a public API. ^ The incentives for “getting angry” aren’t there, like they were for Reddit. Think critically.
- charrondev 3mo agoI love to see an open source implementation. I’ve been using [Octal](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-for-hacker-news/id1308885491 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-for-hacker-news/id130888...) for a while now but it’s not open source. Would you be opposed to a pull request adding login/posting support? I think the way it works in Octal is webview for login, snatching the cookies out of the webview, then using the same posting endpoints as the website with the cookie.
- msephton 3mo agoI added login support day one, it took a while to be reviewed but has now been merged. My method is better than Octal as no screen scraping or html tag parsing is done. My pace of development seems much higher than the repo, so I will probably build out my own fork from this point.
- shelled 3mo agoHN is quite nice inside a desktop browser, but mobile browsers are a different story altogether. But even there, it fares slightly better than old.reddit.com. So looks like I should dust off that xcode.
- Cider9986 3mo agoI disagree it works great in Vanadium.
- _dharmik_ 3mo agoAre you planning to release Android version as well ?
- sylwester 3mo agoI will check if it is possible to build for Android.
- ofcrpls 3mo agoI've been using Octal on iOS and https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News on Mac that was showcased here 4 months ago. Got to give you kudos for the Accessibility enablement though - while some of it is baked-in support, it’s worth appreciating your work in whittling down whatever else can be supported. Here is a comparison for the two on Mac, if you're interested. https://gq6o9uxicyzuw8es6qxe78bnml9wc3re.pastehtml.dev/#core https://gq6o9uxicyzuw8es6qxe78bnml9wc3re.pastehtml.dev/#core
- wittjeff 3mo agoI'm curious if you used a particular tool for this comparison or a LLM. I ask because (layered irony) I'm making a general tool for multi-dimensional item comparisons, using Claude to build the tool (but not the comparisons, not that I mind).
- ofcrpls 3mo agoI had my personal notes comparing Octal and Ironside, then I had claude go through both the repos.
- kamyarg 3mo agoCould not find the appstore link, is it published there?
- lemming 3mo agoOne thing that would be useful in the readme is instructions on how to install the built app on a phone, for those of us who don’t do iOS development.
- cadamsdotcom 3mo agoLooks great! It seems you’re nervous about getting permission to show what you made to the world from Apple. May I suggest you encourage people who want to use the app to get their own subscription and build and install it themselves, or consider AltStore/SideStore. Or go via TestFlight with your own monetization built in. No one should need permission to ship from a trillion dollar company.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo agoThis is a long bow to draw just for an excuse to get on your soapbox about Apple, especially talking to someone who has definitely heard it all before and has definitely formed their own view on this particular topic (and doesn’t need proselytising from you).
- cadamsdotcom 3mo agoOnly offering ideas, people are free to ignore them. You never know - OP might not have thought of these options.
- krageon 3mo agoI thought it was interesting to read. It had some information I didn't have before.
- pi-victor 3mo agoi've been using hackfeed, it does the job. make this available on testflight, this looks great, would love to daily drive it. +1 for the accessibility features, great job!
- ethanhq 3mo agoThe information comes from HN; would there be a risk of copyright infringement if the product were listed on the App Store?
- msephton 3mo agoI'm posting this from a test feature I'm working on for your app: HN login, comments, replies, edit, etc. I've also filed some smaller PRs.
- msephton 3mo ago@sylwester is the repo run by a bot? or is it you? I'm OK with either, it's just issues are being marked as "help wanted" even though they are done in PRs waiting to be merged. It seems the replies in the threads ignore all user comments? What's going on? And I've completed your big "login" feature request, it is done, just waiting for the PRs to be merged so I can make a nice clean rebase and tidy PR for you to review. But if small PRs aren't being merged I'm reluctant to file a larger one.
- Studui81Labs 3mo ago[flagged]