Here I am reading hn on a Droid and boy is it terrible. Text too small. Text poorly wrapped. Buttons misclicked all over the place. So bless you sir. With half a billion smart phones sold in just the last couple of years, this is overdue.

You still need to bump up the fonts on the FP about 2 points. On mobile, favor horsey big usable text over any concession to style.

For some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites.

I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.

On the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page from being zoomed withe the following meta tag :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>

But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.

(that tag is on the site)

Thank you! I've been using iCombinator but half the time I get a Python exception when loading comments. Hope this will work better. Cheers.

Yes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version.

The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working on that.

The 'Article Text' is incredibly useful on old mobiles and slow connections.

I will now be able to read actual articles, not just HN comments. Thank you!

You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful.

I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it.

You can pass any URL through it on this form: http://toadjaw.com/article

Cool, but doesn't look much different than a simple feed in google reader really.

Like Jakob pointed out, I added the ability to pull the text of the linked article, which still needs some tweaking but works for most normal blog/news articles. It really makes articles readable on phones. It's based arc90's readability.

In addition, I added in the ability to read the comments and made them collapsible (like reddit).

But yes, if you only want the list of the front page links, the RSS will do.

I plan on adding more features soon: -Make comments sortable by date or points -More extensive caching of the comment pages along with the article text (in case either go down) -Improve the overall look and feel

You didn't use the "Article Text" feature, did you? I think that's a really great feature. Especially if you're on a slow connection.

Would love to see the text displayed inversely - whether in traditional terminal style (green text on black background) or something similar to arc90's readability style.

That should be doable with just CSS. I put on a "settings" page on my TODO list to do just that.

Sounds great. I'll be looking forward to the settings update which I assume will be accessible via a different url (versus user controlled setting)? I.e. toadjaw.com/hninverse Again, nice implementation and it's become my default as of now.

Please add proper support for discussion (Ask HN, etc) posts. This is my #1 annoyance of iCombinator. Too many taps and backs to view the question then view the thread.

Anything in particular you were thinking of? I'm not sure I quite get the feedback.

The OP discussion text is not in the same view as the comments. Otherwise, I love iCombinator!

This will be my #1 priority.

Great! One other piece of feedback. There needs to be more contrast between the meta line (points/name/etc) and the text of the comments.

Done! Ask HN questions now work. You can also get to the "Ask HN" and "New" questions by clicking the link in the header. I'll work on the contrast problem. I noticed it too, I'm just a horrible designer.

It would be very nice someone purchased a more rememberable url... hnmobile.info is available, for example. I guess that would do the trick. No need of a .com tld here.

http://www.icombinator.net/ I really wish there was a way to comment and vote from the interface, though.

I really like icombinator but I wanted to address some problems and add new features (View the article text, collapse/expand comments, and return to the previous position when using the browsers back button).

This is awesome! (iCombinator author here :) Looking forward to the new features coming to your app!

Thanks a lot! My first attempt with mobile specific web pages. A lot to learn.

Yes, HN could really need a mobile version. Also, is there some official API? Could people write mobile apps based on HN?

The official API is to scrape the HTML

that's no API. It's subject to change whenever they wish.

I use a mobile browser (Atomic) which has great support for tabs- therefore I liked icombinator because it would by default open artcle links in a new tab.

Is there a way that you could have an option stored in a cookie that would determine whether or not to open those links in a new tab?

Very excited that you are working on this project and nice work so far!

That sounds very doable. I'll eventually have a settings page to set those kinds of options. Thanks for using it!

I guess by mobile you mean iPhone; it looks pretty poor on Fennec/Maemo or probably any landscape device.

If it is any consolation it doesn't look very nice on the iPhone in landscape either.

I fixed the landscape problem. It turns out that adding -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; prevents the text from enlarging when rotating the phone to landscape. Adding that appears to have fixed it.

An icon for iPhone users would be nice...

EDIT: Oh, and thank you! It really seems to be better than iCombinator.

Do you know where to find a HN icon in ico format?

EDIT: Duh... HN itself has one. I'll use it.

EDIT: Ok, I added it. Thanks for reminding me about this.

Looks nice! You should steal my favorite iCombinator feature, though: the Instapaper links. Also, the Article text links all return errors, but I'll take it on faith they produce or will produce in the future some easy to read version of article text.

How does this work?

For the home page, I request the HTML from HN, process it, and create a collection of elements that represent a HN news item: URL, Title, # of comments, ID, Posted By, Date, and so on. Then use that to generate the new HTML. I cache that for 200 seconds and store a copy in the event that I can't read the HTML from HN.

Works just about the same way for the comments , except it adds some additional functionality like collapsing comments. With the nature of comments being nested, a recursive function worked really well on rendering the output.

The article text functionality uses the algorithm from arc 90's readability project, which is in javascript. I used the main idea behind their readability algorithm for this, except mine runs server side (C#) where theirs is all done on the client.

I actually wish the main site stylesheet can be changed so that the white columns on left and right sides does not show up in mobile screen. This will save spaces, make the text bigger and make navigation/zooming easier on small screen.

For the front page or the comment pages?

Both.

Was planning on doing something similar using YQL. Nice one.

I can recommend the HN app on Android market too.

Bookmarked. It is now possible to click the comments link on an iPad without missing 70% of the time.

Edit: forget it. The links are target="_blank".

I just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a new window/tab either.

Feature request: Add the time that has elapsed since last update. For example:

"Last fetched 5/30/2010 8:23:51 AM PST (17 minutes ago)"

Works and looks great on my gphone.

Could you easily add duckduckgo style infinite scrolling?

Yeah, shouldn't be hard. I'll add that to my list.

good readable on my iPhone, better than what I have seen so far, nice weekend project. I will keep using it for now. Thank you

nice..but looks little bit dull.... anyways nice work..

Looks great!