simonhalvdansson / harmonic-hn

Modern Android client for Hacker News

Harmonic for Hacker News

Harmonic for Hacker News is an Android Hacker News client which is meant to be modern, fast and well thought out. You can find it on Google Play for download.

This has been my personal side project since 2020 and since starting my PhD in 2021 the time I have to dedicate to Harmonic has decreased. My personal philosophy on side projects is that the most important thing is building something that is actually shipped. Since much of my knowledge on building Android apps is ~10 years old, Harmonic does not use Kotlin or the latest Android API's and is probably not the easiest app to dig into the source code of. However, it is shipped, and it works fairly well in my opinion at least. :)

The purpose of open-sourcing Harmonic is thus mainly to enable interested users to submit pull requests fixing issues or adding features. I would like to still be able to find my way around the app's code so I am not looking for a full Kotlin rewrite but if you have something you'd like to see fixed or added I am very open to PR's. I'll still commit things myself when I have time.

Features

• Basic account functionality: log in, vote, comment, and submit
• Material 3 design with some nice animations
• Several themes including full black
• A ton of customization options, bordering on feature creep
• Fast!

harmonic-hn's Issues

Bottom sheet icons visual bug in post preview while using WebView

Please see the screenshot and the bottom sheet. On my device the icons are either missing height or they are too wide.

I'm using Galaxy S22 and the play store version. Should I provide something more to pin this down?

Option to set default start page

Best/new/top/last week - that sort of thing

Option for auto collapsed comments

When you enter the comments, it would be nice to have an option for the comments to be collapsed by default.

Feature: Previous Discussions lookup

Feature Suggestion: a way to quickly list the previous occasions a URL has been posted, including the number of points & comments. Maybe limited to the top 20 posts?

Icons on collapsed bottom sheet squished

On my Samsung S20+, the bottom sheet below the WebView has its icon buttons squished. However, the issue only occurs if Android's navigation bar is invisible (Gesture control is enabled). If the normal navigation bar is visible, the collapsed bottom sheet is displayed correctly.

Screenshot:

Add support for predictive back

Details can be found in https://developer.android.com/guide/navigation/custom-back/predictive-back-gesture.

Possibly this could cause some issues with the SwipeBack implementation but I think it should be smooth sailing.

Release APKs on GitHub Releases

It would be a nice to have since It'd enable Harmonic to be installable/upgradable directly via Obtainium.

Sharing posts should only contain URL's

Right now we add the post title as well - I feel like that use case is unrealistic and it's better to just share the URL. This is a very minor change but I am away on a conference right now so it's just an issue for now.

Option to disable comment close animation

Self explanatory, this is nice as an accessibility feature also.

Can't vote on posts even when logged in

I have included 2 screenshots above to showcase the issue where I can't vote on a post even when logged in. When I enter my information when prompted it does nothing

WebView audio keeps playing

If the user interacts with a video or audio object I think these keep going even after the user fully exits the WebView - at least this happened to me once. My interpretation is that the WebView is not properly killed of once we're done with it. In my personal TODO I wrote down that this happened for a post with a title involving "A trail tale" but I don't recall the specific post. Please post a comment if you can reliably reproduce this and.

On a related note - perhaps we're leaking memory if the WebView is not properly killed off?

Cannot parse titles that contain "<3"

The reason for this is that we treat titles as HTML partly - this is good in many situations but obviously not all. Not immediately obvious to me how this should be treated. A band-aid is of course to have a special case for "<3".

App loses scroll position on some configuration changes

App doesn't handle all configuration changes correctly, for example enabling battery saving mode.

Orientation and screen size changes are handled without activity recreation that results in the lost scroll, but it is still recreated in other cases. Also, disabling activity recreation is not recommended. Instead you should use ViewModels to keep data during configuration change and OS will usually handle the UI part

option to sort the stories based on time posted

First of all, thanks for making such an amazing app. :)

If it isn't too much to ask can you add an option to sort the stories based on time posted?

Widget support

Haven't you heard - widgets are cool again now after WWDC! Seriously, a widget has long been envisioned but never materialized. The way I imagine it this should looks similar to the main screen in terms of typography and colors with top stories sorted as in the app. However I don't know whether to include a refresh button, a "last updated" notice, a way to go to commens/the article and such. Feel free to submit a mockup or of course a proposed solution, this is a very open issue and if you do something it is very possible that I will have opinions on the design so this is not the easiest issue to work on. However the payback is huge with widgets being so hip right now 😉

Smoothly animate keyboard bottom bar when posting comments

This (https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/sw-keyboard) should be implemented for the scree where comments are made - seems easy enough.

Search options

The HN Algolia API which is used for searching supports options (sorting and dates). This has given me much headaches trying to implemt and digging into code you will notice that there are hidden buttons in the comments header which was my attempt at this. The problem is that it is hard to have Dropdowns in a RecyclerViews but if you could get this working I would be very happy.

Deploy new version to the play store

There are a bunch of quality of life improvements added since the latest Play Store release. Can you release a new version?

Crash on current frontpage

Stacktrace is:

FATAL EXCEPTION: main
Process: com.simon.harmonichackernews, PID: 8095
java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: setSpan (50 ... 51) ends beyond length 50
	at android.text.SpannableStringBuilder.checkRange(SpannableStringBuilder.java:1326)
	at android.text.SpannableStringBuilder.setSpan(SpannableStringBuilder.java:685)
	at android.text.SpannableStringBuilder.setSpan(SpannableStringBuilder.java:677)
	at com.simon.harmonichackernews.l.h(SourceFile:312)
	at androidx.recyclerview.widget.RecyclerView$s.i(SourceFile:1226)
	at androidx.recyclerview.widget.m.c(SourceFile:46)
	at androidx.recyclerview.widget.m.b(SourceFile:187)
	at androidx.recyclerview.widget.m.run(SourceFile:78)
	at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:942)
	at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
	at android.os.Looper.loopOnce(Looper.java:201)
	at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:288)
	at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:7884)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
	at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:548)
	at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:936)

Monohrome/Themed app icon

Android 13 added support for themed app icons,.
Hermonic doesn't support this. It's not that much work
I can help you out with implementation if needed

Fix right margin for landscape phones with button navigation

If you don't have gesture navigation, the navigation buttons go above the comments button - this is bad.

Support Android 12L new tablet navigation bar

At least on my Galaxy Tab S7, ever since Android 12L the navigation bar size can be changed by long pressing this. Google apps seem to deal with this in a nice way but Harmonic is a bit dirty when it comes to handling paddings for system elements - things are done manually in a bad way, I'm sorry. As a result, this 12L behavior is not taken into account and the navigation bar ends up covering part of the screen content.

Ideally this should be treated with a rework of how system paddings are handled, I saw some Google IO stuff about this being possible to handle in a good way but haven't looked into it.

Submission comments sorted by number of replies/votes

I use this app almost daily and it would be amazing if there was the option to view the comments of a submission sorted by the number of replies (or maybe votes)
This is useful to bubble up the most interesting discussion in that story.

Not sure what is the sorting algo right now

Merging bookmarks with HN favorites

The current bookmark system is purely local but I think at least one other HN app has managed to hook into the HN favorites system for saving bookmarks to a user. This should be added (and made the default for logged in users), perhaps the terminology should also be changed in that case so that it says "Favorite" for logged in users and "Bookmark" for regular users.

Compact header feature breaks the header size

Compact header feature breaks the header size and makes drop down menu, search option and setting inaccessible.

Better handling for no internet connection

If the user starts the app in airplane mode of something like that, we only show the "Loading failed, retry" view. I think it would be better to say something about there being no internet connection. It is fine to only do this on the main screen but better to have it everywhere. Perhaps there could also be a button to go to settings if airplane mode is active - depends on what looks good from a design perspective.

Multi screen settings

The number of settings is too many, there should be a main screen and then the current categories should be sub-screens. Perhaps the entire thing can be remade in a more modern style (i.e. Compose or something like that) since this is such a isolated component of the app.

Opening comment from submissions is misinterpreted as link

The app treats the comment view as a link and includes a WebView - I think this is because of the new handling on links to HN introduced in 1.9.3.

App cannot be built because of JCenter

Incident status here: https://status.gradle.com/incidents/7x4wqd7zv715
JCenter is currently redirecting all requests to Maven Central. Because html-textview isn't published to Maven Central, the build fails:

> Could not resolve all files for configuration ':app:debugRuntimeClasspath'.
   > Could not find org.sufficientlysecure:html-textview:4.0.
     Searched in the following locations:
       - https://dl.google.com/dl/android/maven2/org/sufficientlysecure/html-textview/4.0/html-textview-4.0.pom
       - https://jcenter.bintray.com/org/sufficientlysecure/html-textview/4.0/html-textview-4.0.pom
       - https://jitpack.io/org/sufficientlysecure/html-textview/4.0/html-textview-4.0.pom
     Required by:
         project :app

The lib is also not available via JitPack because of a failing build.

Usage of JCenter has been deprecated for a long time now and it's not the first incident with it, so even if everything fixes itself, it's better to stop relying on JCenter

Loading slow webpage and immediately going to comments keeps web navigation open

The web navigation controls will be visible if you click a (slowly loading) web page and immediately swipe down to see the comments, this is clearly unacceptable!

Transparent status bar text posts bad top margin

Open any text post with transparent status bar enabled and the top margin will be off

Request: Add support for viewing https://news.ycombinator.com/active

The dropdown menu currently shows the following:

Top, Last 24h, Last 48h, Last week, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, HN Jobs, and Bookmarks. Please add support for viewing Active threads

Thanks!

Loading new users without submissions throws exception

When a new user has logged on, it caused an error loop because the submission key is not present in the json payload.

Any indicator or sign that a comment is downvotted/flagged

Vanilla HN already blurs comments that are downvotted/flagged so I hope that this app will be able to do something like that too. Maybe change font color or something.

Navigation Buttons to Navigate Between Top Level Comments Cutting Off Top Row of Text

Using the Navigation Buttons to move between top comments is resulting in the top line of text and user name being below the fold and unreadable.

Option to view upvotes on comments

Right now, we can only see upvotes on comments which have replies to it: On collapsing the comment thread.

An enhancement and low priority issue.

Hide submissions you've voted on?

Is it possible to hide submissions that you've already voted on?

I think the answer is "no", but I would love to find out it's already available.

Link submission with text, does not show the text

If you submit a link to HN it is discouraged to also write a text. But it is still possible and gets used relatively often.

For exampe this "Show HN" which is currently on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37125118

In the Harmonic App, only the link and title are visible and not the submission text.

Comment navigation button stuck on

I just got upgraded to v1.9.4. to find that the top-level navigation button is perma-enabled. It enabled itself and toggling it on/off has no effect. I also tried clearing both storage and cache to no effect.

Material styling for comment posting ProgressBar

When posting a comment, a dialog is showed indicating that the posting is underway. The progressbar in this dialog is not styled according to the app theme - outrageous! This should be adressed.

Heading is being clipped

I have the toggle Transparent status bar as off, and the heading is being cut off

Open news.ycombinator.com links inside the app

There are submissions that link to each other.
Example

It will be ideal if accessing that link will open it using the app the instead of the web view.

White theme bug

Hi,
The recently updated version (1.9.1) broke the white theme for me. Everything is washed out, as shown in the following picture.

Thank you!

Option to use device back for WebView back

Right now, when a user is browsing the WebView and presses their back button, they leave the webview and go back to the main page. There should be an option to have this step back the WebView (WebView.goBack()) in case that's possible and otherwise go down to the comments and it should be false by default.

Feature: Enablinging swipes on comment navigationbutton to change comment levels

I have seen one HN app do this and that was it but I loved it. Unfotunately can no longer find that app but your has it prety close.
The top level navigation button is cool but it does not allow to look at first response and skip answrers to it and jump to second response to the comment.
I suggest adding togle to enable sideswipes. Right jumps level down; left level up; down to next comment; up to previous.
Behaviour example: Swipe down: first comment; Swipe down: second comment; swipe right: first answer to second comment; swipe down: second answer to second comment skipping past answers to first answer to second comment; swipe left: back to second comment.

Automatic release on tag push did not work for V1.9.6

Sorry to bother you again man, but as of 63fa0a0, pushed tags will automatically trigger a Release creation.
I saw you pushed the tag for the release, but the filter was on vX.Y.Z tags (check the regex here: https://github.com/SimonHalvdansson/Harmonic-HN/blob/main/.github/workflows/tag.yml#L6C8-L6C17), and what's been pushed was capitalized (i.e. V1.9.6), so it didn't trigger the auto-release mechanism :)

Foldable support

Supporting foldables properly would mean showing comments on the right pane in a manner similar to how tablets are currently handled. Adding this support requires quite a deep dive into the architecture of the app but would be nice to have.

Share by e-mail problem

Comment SwipeBack disabled after web browsing

A semi-common occurance for me is that once I've interacted with the WebView of a post for a bit and go down to the comments, the SwipeBack functionality is not working. I don't have a way to reproduce this issue so if you can figure that out please leave a comment. Either way, this should be fixed.

Already, SwipeBack functionality is enabled/disabled based on what the user is doing as we don't want SwipeBack when the user is interacting with the WebView so my guess is that the app changes it state without updating this properly.

Opening Submissions fails

When viewing a users submissions in the app you can't click on the submission directly. Opening the comments works and opening the submission from there works too.

But in the submission view it fails with the toast message "Couldn't open link to: https://[..]"