audip / refined-hckrnews

Refined and elegant client apps for reading HackerNews

Refined HackerNews

Goals

To build a refined, privacy-focused, lightweight and elegant app for reading Hackernews, improves on hckrnews.com website

Motivation

Catching up on hackernews is a painful experience with many websites and apps that fragment the experience instead of streamlining it.

Why now?

Most mobile clients lack dark mode functionality and aren't designed so that you can catch up when you missed a few days of news

Folder structure

• backend: folder for backend API server files
• frontend: folder for frontend clients in React Native
• desktop: folder for desktop clients (in Electron, React or a similar framework)

User Stories

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The following required functionality is completed:

• User can view the Home Tab screen to filter the list of articles by Top 10, Top 20, Top 50%, All
• User can view the Story Detail screen to view the comments and link to article
  • Ability to view/read webpages without leaving the app
• User can view the Settings screen to edit basic settings
  • Appearance (font, text size, reader mode)
  • Theme (light mode / gray mode / OLED dark mode)
  • App Icon (customizable icons for light, dark, colorful and seasonal)
  • Background sync (30mins, 60mins, etc.)
• User can read the news articles and comments offline (background sync/refresh)
• User can catch up to missed days of articles/news (yesterday, day before and endless scroll)

Phase 2

The following optional functionality is completed:

• User can read text summary of article
• User can search HackerNews from the search tab
• User can customize the following settings
  • Profile (posts, comments)
  • Connect their YCombinator account
  • Ability to provide feedback/feature requests
  • Ability to donate to cover development costs
• User can engage on HackerNews similar to Apollo or Reddit official apps
  • Comments
  • Upvote/downvote on comments and articles
  • Writing Editor to comment
  • Tap to collapse/hide a comment thread
• User can sync their reading across devices
• User can download iOS/Android app from the App Store or Play Store
  • Conform to iOS 13 SDK
  • Conform to Android 10 SDK

Future Work

The following optional features are implemented:

• User can view the top comments
• User can download desktop app from a public AWS S3 bucket
• User can post an article or write a comment using anonymous/ephemeral account
• User can explore top writers on HackerNews using the explore tab

Technology Stack

• Built on Firebase platform by Google
• Hosted on AWS Lambda or Google App Engine
• Hosted databases such as mLab or RDS
• Hosted exception tracking with sentry.io
• Cloud-native 12-factor backend application

Detailed Requirements

Design

Prototype: Screen mockups of the Refined HckerNews app

Design:

• Post an ad on Fiverr to get a polished design of the app

Other:

• Post an ad on Fiverr to get custom app icons for the app

Development

Technical Spec: Technical Approach Description

Frontend Mobile Apps:

Most users (or readers) will read HackerNews on mobile apps and so React Native is a library that will be help quickly write code for Android and iOS that can be compiled into native-application code. With the community support for React Native, it serves as a great starting point for documentation, tutorials and searching for solutions to common problems. The react native apps can fetch data from HackerNews API and HnRSS where needed.

For phase 2, Google's firebase project provides excellent client libraries that will solve the use-cases of authentication, syncing state/data across devices and keeping track of user profiles. A backend server with text summarizer API written in Python's Flask/Django framework and deployed with Zappa to AWS Lambda can take as input a URL to an article and respond with summarized text in JSON. HnRSS provides an Algolia API to search HackerNews for the search tab.

Todo (Technical Tasks & Assignees)

• Discovery:
  • Familiarise with the react native library
  • Develop a Proof of Concept app with react native tutorial/example

Testing

User Acceptance Testing

• Collect feedback from product managers
• Collect feedback from beta users

Deployment

...

Other

...

Out of Scope

...

Philosophy

• No advertising on the apps whatsoever
• Minimal and privacy focused analytics on the apps (https://github.com/electerious/Ackee as an alternative for Google Analytics)
• Sign-in with Apple functionality and keep user emails private
• Allow user donations through PayPal to cover cloud hosting costs.