If I were to pay money for my HN, I'd want at least some of it to go to the actual HN team.

I find it funny that a community of people who make their living off selling software are so averse to paying for it. How much of your hourly rate is the cost of buying this? How much time do you spend on HN daily? How much percent better does reading HN does this app need to make, for you to be ROI positive in a week?

It's not the problem of spending $2, it's the question of if that $2 is going to the right people.

One might think that the developer of the application is the right person to pay for the application.

Why is $2 going to some ppl who made something which provides you with value >2 everyday,(or some random value), the wrong people?

Extend the analogy only a little, "I dont buy anything on the internet as I want some of it to go to Tim Barnes Lee."

Indeed. This is the crux of our news organizations' current crisis. They create and organize the content, yet everybody else is using the content for profit. I choose to reward those who create and organize the content.

The delivery of content is extremely easy, especially for me since I'm a developer myself.

When's your Hacker News iPhone app coming out then?

Yeah, £1.19 seems a bit too steep when I can instantly fire up Safari on my iPhone and view the full hn for free.

How many sips of beer is that? 1.5?

http://www.icombinator.net/ works great for me, and costs nothing. Also has nifty instapaper functionality which I've grown to live on.

I agree. I just bought the app and it offers an inferior experience to icombinator from what I can see. This app doesn't have threading in the comments (you can't see who replied to what), it doesn't have the instapaper functionality, etc...

I expected an app to at least allow me to log in and post comments but it doesn't even do that. Which makes me ask what the point of having a native app even was.

Very cool. Thanks for the link!

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809181 for a discussion about other HN on the iPhone solutions.

My version is at http://mobilehackernews.appspot.com/

It uses iUI for the list and if you click on a story link it uses arc90's Readability to make the site you visit easier to read. The Readability script also puts a button in the top left corner of the page to revert to the original version.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

That actually seemed awesome until i started getting this on pretty much every page:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 507, in __call__
    handler.get(*groups)

  File "/base/data/home/apps/mobilehackernews /1.336829969607358575/main.py", line 137, in get
    html.head.append(cssCode)

 AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'append'

Odd, I saw that few times just now. But I can't reproduce it. The error suggests that when BeautifulSoup parsed to the contents of the posted article, it found a page with no head node in the HTML.

Kevin, you should probably check this stuff too. Not because PG&Co will sue you, but just to be a good dude.

http://ycombinator.com/legal.html

I highly doubt the developer did this for money. At best he'll make $1000. I'm guessing he developed the app for himself and just decided to release it. Why not comment about how it could be better?

My suggestion has already been voiced: Need upvote capability.

"The item you've requested is not currently available in the Polish Store"

Did the developers place geographical restrictions or is this a bug in the iTunes store?

Dear developers, please make sure the app is available everywhere.

I think it's a bit high, but I bought it to give it a run. From the screenshots, it seemed decently full featured. The only thing I wish it had was AT least the upvote capabilities. I never really comment from the iphone, since I know ill limit my comments. Give me a few days of waiting on line with nothing to do and checking HN via my iPhone to give it a final verdict. .99 seems like a better price than 1.99

> a bit high

Seriously?

It must have taken at least a couple weeks of work to write and polish up this app. Then there's ongoing marketing, support, more dev if he adds the features people are asking for here, etc. If the app sells 1000 copies its first month (which would be pretty good!), the economics barely make sense at $1.99. At $0.99 it's basically a community service project.

Games can be priced at a dollar because the audience is everyone with an iPhone. For apps that are carefully tailored to the needs of a small group, you must expect to pay more.

For those without iTunes: http://www.kevintom.com/

http://www.kevintom.com/ycnews didn't render properly in Safari or Firefox...

<sarcasm>Man I am glad I have this app now! HackerNews is a website with MB's of flash and images that make browsing it _really_ slow. I mean it doesn't even have rss!</sarcasm>

I bought it and it looks good. Though I mostly bought it because I noticed that the author used to be my project manager. :) Best of luck with the app, Kevin!

i installed it. i think it's pretty nice but still needs some work. for example, i don't like that it opens the links in safari. i'd rather stay within the application (like the reddit app). if i'm going to end up in safari every time i want to read something, i'll probably just use http://www.icombinator.net/ instead:(

You know... Not everybody has iTunes on the computer... Or even a computer where iTunes is willing to run.

In that case then, this app probably isn't targeted at you.

I do, however, have an iPod and an iMac. I just happen to use Linux for work.

Seriously, I'm not sure what the point of your comments are.

Based on the devices you stated and your presence here, it would seem you are astute enough to recognize that not every app is going to be applicable for all people. This app especially seems to target a niche of a niche (iPhone users reading HN), and is not even 100% necessary within that niche.

Most people would recognize that certain criteria must be met to be able to download and use an App from iTunes.

I don't mean to be harsh, your comments just sort of seemed like statements of the obvious.

I'm guessing he would have rather had a link to the website about the app instead of the iTunes link.

I'm not an iPhone user, but I clicked on this (the comments, not the iTunes link) because I wanted to know about the app, how it looks, what features it provides, how a fellow HN reader envisioned a piece of software, despite the fact that I would never use it.

I would have appreciated a link to a website with this information, but the comments here are just as good :D

none of your screenshots actually show a story. does that mean it just shows the webkit view?

Also, I couldn't tell from the screenshots if the app allowed users to view comments on a submission. As we all know, the discussions can be as good as, if not better, than the articles.

Indeed. I'd buy this instantly if it provided an iPhone-friendly interface for reading the discussion, but I can't tell from the screenshots. Also, if there is a story view --- reasonably sized up-down voting arrows alone would make it worth paying for.

It doesn't even seem to have a way to log in, getting to comments is awkward, and threads are flattened to an iPhone list.

Installed!

Me too! Thanks, much more readable than in Safari.