Octal for Hacker News

The UI is well designed, intuitive, attractive. It’s my preferred way to read HN. But I use the search a lot, and it’s very primitive. I typically have to switch to my desktop’s browser to find anything. The number one thing missing is a date filter. Preferably that allows selecting start/end dates, but even just a dropdown with common ranges would suffice. HN has a lot of content about topics that move quickly, so I often want to see results from the last X time period. But sort by date, and only see bad submissions that never got traction. Sort by relevance and see popular submissions from 12 years ago. And a hard cap on number of results, so I can’t dig deeper even if I wanted to. It leaves much to be desired.

I’ve really enjoyed using this app! The experience of reading through linked pages and comment threads is very smooth. There are some optional quality-of-life features that can be toggled in settings (tab refresh, pure-black UI for OLEDs, quick collapse, etc.); these are nice features that really make interacting with the app feel fluid, and enabling users to enable/disable them according to preference is evidence of very thoughtful design. My only (minor) complaint: the app doesn’t seem to respect certain account settings, specifically regarding whether or not to hide “dead”/downvoted comments. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means, but I would appreciate being able to see comments according to my account preferences. Overall, a terrific app - great work!

Without a doubt, this is the best HN client on iOS. It’s sleek, fast, and there are plenty of settings to tweak if you so desire. And no ads! The developer also seems very responsive to feedback - I posted a tiny styling issue to Octal’s github and an update with a fix was pushed to the App Store in less than 72 hours. I’d love to see some custom icons in the Premium version down the line, but that’s about the only nitpick I can find, and I found it to be worth the price already without them!