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.

Nice work shipping this. The 2k lines of Swift for a fully functional native app is impressive - shows how much SwiftUI has matured. The CI/CD pipeline for macOS code signing is genuinely hard, so thanks for open-sourcing that part. For anyone building side projects: this is the kind of portfolio piece that actually demonstrates real engineering skills. Much more valuable than yet another todo app when you're applying for jobs.

Side note:

Simon Halvdansson runs "Harmonic", an Android client for Hacker News, I am using it daily for 2+ years and I sincerely recommend it.

I even asked him a feature (mark a story as read), and he implemented it shortly after.

Shout-out to you Simon!

https://github.com/SimonHalvdansson/Harmonic-HN

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simon.harm...

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).

Opening the app and getting a new sparkle update dialog everytime is getting very annoying…especially for updates that are relatively minor.

just today its gone from 1.1.3 -> 1.1.4 -> 1.1.5 -> 1.1.6 -> 1.1.7 -> 1.1.8 -> 1.1.9 -> 1.2 -> 1.2.2 (skipped 1.2.1?) in under 5 hours. A lot of these could wait until theyre put in a relatively bigger release!

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!

This is fantastic. The app is simple, useful and feels de-cluttered.

Two of my feature requests: 1. Allow cmd+f search on the whole app - I wanted to search your post on the app but I couldn't 2. A browser button to open the current page on an external browser.

Side note: I am trying to minimize my HN time via getting push notifications for relevant HN posts, and that's how I discovered your post. Would it be cool if one could write custom agents on top of an app? Maybe?

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`

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.

> 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...

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.

> 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. :)

About the only possible suggestion I could make is an addition similar to what the HACK iOS app has: at the top of the comments section is a “bank” icon which leads to various Archive.today domains. Don’t know how it works, but if those entries do exist, it is to archived versions of the page in question. Maybe some sort of a lookup API on Archive’s part?

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.

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.

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!

Could you add comment navigation features? I want to read all top level comments first and be able to down-arrow through them, and right-arrow to expand one level.

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

One thing that I _love_ with the browser is this extension:

https://github.com/timkuijsten/BoundedBikeshed

It lets me see the top-level comments with some indication of the thread depth. Totally changed my post scanning.

Great app. How do you see your previously bookmarked news?

And... is there a way to, ahem, read the 500 tabs I have open on my browser, and re-open them all in the app? Asking for a friend...

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

Having built crossplatform native app supporting MacOS app, I have never gotten notarization to work as I'm not using xcode a lot.

I'm curious, how much does it cost? Is it per build or a subscription? How do you make it work financially for an open-source project?

THis is nice. Congrats on the launch!

Is it possible to add clean reader support so that all articles can be browsed in a similar format?

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

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.

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.

Do we need this? I mean, isn't this what your browser is for?

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.

Really nice app! I would love the ability to override dark mode (I use it for my desktop, but sometimes want a specific app in “normal” mode).

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

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.

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.

Looks really neat! Before I built Hacksy for iOS, I also contemplated building a macOS version for HN news.

I built one and deleted it - suggestion that I found useful

Split-pane the content: original article | comments

After playing around with it for a bit, one request I would like to make is being able to open multiple tabs.

This is so nice. The UX feels very smooth too - I love these kinds of native apps. Thank you!

i would love keyboard-driven navigation! espeically for switching between the post and comments :)

Nice. It is actually very close to the experience I have via RSS on Reeder.

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 make a tvOS client! =) Seriously though.

Congrats on launching!

How is this superior to an RSS reader?

Commenting from the app. Good job!

please add in the keyboard shortcuts to navigate, that's one of my favorite things about native desktop apps

Love this man!

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!!

What does your CLAUDE.md look like?

I mean, what's the point of this app? It looks exactly like the web version, without any improvements over the abysmal HN threading.

Some nice to haves: automatic paywall bypass for paid sites, and automatic cookie/pop-up rejection.

Looks nice but I don't have/want a Mac so I can't really use it. Support for other platforms would be nice.