over 5 years ago from Sam Soffes, Developer & Designer at Nothing Magical
I'm working on a Designer News iOS app (for both iPhone and iPad). What do you want to see in a DN app?
I'm thinking just a list of stories you can tap and read in the app (or optionally Safari or Chrome), gesture to upvote like favorite in Tweetbot, etc.
I'd love some feedback from everyone since you'll be the people using it :)
Out of interest, why would you build an app for a very simple news listing website? I'm sure there's some sort of internal reason but I'd love to hear why an app for only iOS users would make much sense?
I actually use the app almost daily. When i had a crappy web view that launched safari (I use Chrome) I never wanted to read anything.
Makes the experience way better
So the website is crap, build an app?
Gilt has a mobile website
EBay has a mobile website
Google Maps has a mobile website
Yelp has a mobile website
Twitter has a mobile website
Rdio has a mobile website
Website isn't equal to App for so many types of technology companies. None of the above sites are crap, it's that the native app experience isn't achievable on a website.
Sharing with social media and saving the story to read later (Pocket or Instapaper) must be easy. I want to share the story in the main screen, I do not like to click and go to the story before I can share or save it.
Out of the way read later integration in general is essential.
Great idea, Sam! I tend to agree with EJ – an easy way to see the top stories, the stories I have taken part in (via comments), and a clever way to upvote something would be killer. Key for me is to ensure that as much of the screen is content as is possible, and that I don't have to leave the app in order to share to Twitter/Instapaper or view the web page.
It would also be awesome to see a way to favourite stories so I can keep a short list of my favourites so I can go back to them later on. Instapaper support would satisfy this for me for the most part, but it'd be nice to have a common listing of my favourites that I can show friends when they ask about what DN is and why I like it.
Really excited to see what you come up with!
Definitely would want to be able to save stories.
That's exciting, Sam! Look forward to seeing what you come up with (I'm a big fan of Coins and Cheddar and I'm finishing up Execute now)
My main big request would be Push Notifications for replies to my comments.
Might be interesting to show the MOTD on load and fling it away like you do with an image in Tweetbot, and it only shows up again when you re-activate the app and it's changed. maybe fling it up to upvote it and fling it down to downvote it
Cool! Ya I'm working with the Layer Vault folks to get some sort of push going. Probably won't make it into 1.0, but definitely at some point.
I like the MOTD flinking idea :)
I was thinking about this recently and downloaded an app in the app store and was disappointed all I could do was read news -
I really want to be able to post from the app / I read most of my news and get inspiration on my phone now a days - posting from app is huge for me.
gesture based voting is great
Need to be able to comment and reply (may need to reformat threaded replies)
push notification if my post gets on the top stories
share to twitter / fb for all stories
The app you downloaded was probably MobileDN by Alisdair (https://news.layervault.com/u/201/alasdair-monk) and up until recently there was no DN API that's why it was limited in function ;)
Sam, why build a entirely new app and don't team up? You're both nice guys as far as I can tell from Twitter, DN, etc. :)
FYI there is no way to post a new story via the API yet, but you can now leave comments and vote on things, which would be a nice improvement.
As Benjamin says, the API to do all this was only very recently released. The good news is that the next version of MobileDN supports all of this (and many other things discussed in this thread) :) – it's waiting for review (7 days now) so should be reviewed very, very soon.
Here's a sneak peek ;)
Really excited about this, such a great app Alasdair. Thanks for the hard work to help with my DN addiction :)
great work! hopefully they update the API so we can post too ;)
Definitely just a clean way to browse top stories, with some gesture control included. Also it would be cool to separate different post types (Show DN, AMA, Site Design, etc.) into different viewing categories. I'm also a fan of that flicking MOTD idea. :)
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
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