Another thing to test is whether the app respects the portrait/landscape orientation. I use Ricky's app to vote and post, but I'll stick with Manuel's reader for everything else: it respects the page orientation, displays comment nesting clearly and allows me to collapse comment threads. Plus, it has a button to let me refresh what I'm reading, in case I want to do it more often than it already does automatically.
I have a Prime, and I remember going through all the available apps ~6 months ago and uninstalling them all.
They were either bad apps in general or were potentially nice phone-sized apps with no optimisation done for tablets. When I say optimisation I'm referring to both the UI layout and the general rendering performance. For some reason (I'm not an android dev) certain apps have performance issues that scale with your pixel count (I guess they are hand-rendering things themselves and simply Doing It Wrong) and make them unusable.
I can't remember which though, so I'll install your top two when I get home (~8-10hrs) and report back.
Thanks! Looking forward to hear your results. If any of them works well on your Prime, could you email me some screenshots? thomas at kjemperud dot net
Gah! So, I tried your top three and im sorry to report it's a trifecta of failure: Hacker News Beta renders really s
owly, Hacker News Android performs well but doesn't support landscape (it stays in profile) and Hacker News Droid performs Ok, rotates in landscape but without a useful or optimised layout, and as you state doesn't let you log in.
I tried three native apps and had problems with all of them. I recently switched to ihackernews, and everything's been great. The hidden killer feature is that you can use browser-provided tabs.
Also, iHackerNews has links to 'viewtext' on the article, which works on about 75% of articles that I've tried, and saves a lot of badnwidth/cpu/ram.
The viewtext service is also incredibly awesome for printing out articles on paper -- I've found it to be much better than even the custom "print" versions of many articles, and certainly better than readability, etc.
Thanks for sharing this list. HN is one if the few things I semi regularly read and I'm ecstatic so far that I can use my note to participate on hn and continue to keep my laptop as a workspace first.
I tested them all, there is always something that make it a worst experience than using a browser, for exemple when it lost the position in the comment thread. So now I rely exclusively to Chrome.
Agree. I've found the web view in Pocket (and probably other apps with built-in web views) to do a better job of displaying HN comment pages than any of the browsers I tried, though. Simply because it wraps the comments at a comfortable line length.
Hacker News Full by Chad Etzel only stopped working in the last day or two (probably something with the API it uses), but is my favorite app. Hopefully it gets an update or otherwise starts working again.
This review doesn't reflect (my) daily usage. Hacker News Beta is gorgeous but it's a usability nightmare and none of the post functionality works. Either the UX is broken for it and/or it force closes on a brand new (rom on my) Galaxy Nexus. You lose scroll position going between Activities, you can only view one page, etc.
It's true that I haven't used all of the apps for a long period of time. Hacker News Droid is the one I've been using the most, but sadly it hasn't stayed up to date compared with some of the competition. By the way, I just added Hacker News Android to the comparison. It is really beautiful and functional, and seems like a great choice if you're running ICS or above. It might also be slightly unstable though, and I had to log in before it would load the front page. Still, it's worth a look :)
