hnand

Thanks! As of now I don't have any plans for Android. It's a native iOS app written in Swift, so that would require building a new app from the ground up.

Thanks! I wanted to read comments in a breadth-first manner, and I knew from the start that using Apple navigation solutions wouldn't work for me, the visual change on the screen between two states would be too big and distracting.

I made a few prototypes, experimented with omni-directional scrolling (comments don't change their relative position to each other, but you kind of move the viewfinder and it sticks to the edges of subtrees), color coding in different patterns and nothing felt good. I gave up and a few months later when I was thinking about a different problem, I just had a light-bulb moment about this one, mind works in mysterious ways I guess. It was unnecessary complicated at first (like dragging the designated "borders" with the comment staying fixed in one place), but I simplified it in the process quite a bit.

It looks pretty straightforward now, but I think a lot of people would be surprised to see how many tricks are there for it to actually look and feel that way.

That's how my app handles customizations - they just get resetted once in a while, but you can use them without paying, Premium just makes them permanent. I wonder if it's not obvious from the UI and people think that you can't use them at all.

That's an interesting UX problem. Have you tried Anchors ("#" buttons)? Do you feel like it would be convenient if there was an option to mark all new posts as anchors? You could jump between them with "previous/next" buttons.

Good idea, will do.

> I'd have avoided a free version and just made the basic price at least $6

I would definitely get less heat, but the user would paradoxically end up in a worse position. I feel like there's always a disconnect between the user and developer when it comes to a freemium model. Developer thinks that it's a paid app that the user can actually try and make an informed decision before buying. User thinks that it's a free app with arbitrary annoying restrictions. And I understand the user perspective.

I think things would be better if refunding was less painful for the user and developer both. If there was a zero friction way of refunding things, we could just abandon freemium.

Thanks! Under the "Sign In" button you can tap "Alternative method", it opens a webview and you can auto-fill you credentials from the keychain. It's a few more taps, because you have to choose from the list of saved credentials, but otherwise that would be a security risk, Apple wouldn't allow that.

> I feel you should be able to tap a comment to expand, rather than just swipe

One frustration that I had with existing apps is collapsing a subtree by accident when tapping the upvote button. I feel like it would be even more frustrating with how my app works, it'd just expand/collapse if you miss the hitbox.

> Also it’d be neat if you just kept the new scroll position when expanding rather than scrolling back

The issue with that is that if you expand a subtree, scroll way way down and then collapse, your scroll position will be so far away from the initial node that you'd get lost.

> The orange flashes when navigating back are distracting. Just use the default system behaviour here (grey)

I'll add an ability yo choose the color in the Settings.

> If you tap the active tab (both in the heading and tab bar), it should scroll to the top

Nice idea, I'll add that.