All the various sections and categories on HN are supported – the front page, new, show, shownew, ask, best, active, jobs. There's an integrated browser with mobilizer support, and you can instantly switch between the browser and comments with a simple swipe. Comment threads are color-coded and collapsible.
This is my first non-trivial project that I actually finished and released, so I'd appreciate any feedback.
Not to much of a fan of the colored bars for nested comments, shades of the same color (we already have an accent color on WP) might be nicer. Might also be nicer to people who are colorblind.
The address/toolbar below the article feels more like Android than WP. On WP you usually get an explanation of icons in the toolbar when stopping up because their captions are right underneath the low end of the screen. Took me a while to figure out what the icons meant which IMHO isn't that great UX. Also a reason why I like the toolbar design on WP, because it's compact and supports labels if the user needs them. Not sure how to incorporate the usual toolbar design into the current workings of the app, though.
When tapping the '...' button the animation of the ellipsis feels like it rotates around the wrong pivot. It doesn't do so when swiping to the left. Maybe that's because the scrolling left animation of the bar is eased when tapping the button and the rotation animation is not. Maybe its even easier to bind the rotation angle to the current horizontal shift of the bar (coming from WPF here, so maybe it doesn't make sense).
Clearing the browser before loading a new article would be nice. Loading takes a while and tapping on a headline just to see the old content can be a bit strange.
1. I assume "the ability to content" means voting/commenting? ;)
2. The advantage of those colored bars is that they are very easy to visually parse, while also requiring very little indentation. In fact, it would take 40 levels of comment nesting before half the screen width of a regular size (non-phablet) device is used up. However, I see your point, and will probably add an alternate comment threading style later on.
3. The address bar for the browser is actually very similar to the standard WP browser, which also doesn't have the usual icon labels. Back, forward, refresh, stop, more, and share should be self-explanatory, so I guess you were having issues with the mobilize and open-in-IE icons? I might change those out for the reading mode icon that IE uses [1], and the IE icon, respectively, which should hopefully make them more obvious. The reason I did not use them in the first place is because I have not been able to find vector/font versions of those icons. Also, I agree with you on the WP app bar, it's really well designed, however since it's an OS component it can't really be customized which is why I'm not using it.
4. The rotation angle is already bound to the horizontal scroll offset. As for the rotation direction, I tried both ways and this one felt better to me. I'm not sure why scrolling the bar in one direction should cause the rotation to feel wrong to you though, maybe try scrolling the bar by dragging instead of using the button and see if it still feels weird?
5. That's a very good point that I never thought of. Fixed, and should be available along with some other minor design changes next week.
BTW, would you be interested in beta testing a Reddit client I'm currently working on? Your feedback has been the best I've gotten so far, much appreciated :)
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/03/04/introducing-re...
* it would be great to be able to submit comment,
* I use "collapse thread" quite often so it would be beneficial to do it in one tap.
Overall good design and better than other, probably abandoned clients for WP8. Keep up the good work!
Voting and commenting is definitely planned, however I'm waiting on the API to add support for authentication first. The app actually does not use the API since it's somewhat lacking right now [1] so it scrapes the markup instead, but I'm not quite comfortable with implementing login/voting/commenting by scraping.
You can collapse comments by tapping anywhere outside the text area, i.e. on the author/time header or on the margins to the left and right. I'm sorry that's not obvious, I'll probably add a message explaining it in the next update.
