GitHub: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News
Download (signed & notarized DMG, macOS 14.0+): https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News/releases
Screenshots: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News#screenshots
I spend a lot of time reading HN — I wanted something that felt like a proper Mac app: a sidebar for browsing stories, an integrated reader for articles, and comment threading — all in one window. Essentially, I wanted HN to feel like a first-class citizen on macOS, not a website I visit.
What it does:
- Split-view layout — stories in a sidebar on the left, articles and comments on the right, using the standard macOS NavigationSplitView pattern.
- Built-in ad blocking — a precompiled WKContentRuleList blocks 14 major ad networks (DoubleClick, Google Syndication, Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon ads, etc.) right in the WebKit layer. No extensions needed. Toggleable in settings.
- Pop-up blocking — kills window.open() calls. Also toggleable.
- HN account login — full authentication flow (login, account creation, password reset). Session is stored in the macOS Keychain, and cookies are injected into the WebView so you can upvote, comment, and submit stories while staying logged in.
- Bookmarks — save stories locally for offline access. Persisted with Codable serialization, searchable and filterable independently.
- Search and filtering — powered by the Algolia HN API. Filter by content type (All, Ask, Show, Jobs, Comments), date range (Today, Past Week, Past Month, All Time), and sort by hot or recent.
- Scroll progress indicator — a small orange bar at the top tracks your reading progress via JavaScript-to-native messaging.
- Auto-updates via Sparkle with EdDSA-signed updates served from GitHub Pages.
- Dark mode — respects system appearance with CSS and meta tag injection.
Tech details for the curious:
The whole app is ~2,050 lines of Swift across 16 files. It uses the modern @Observable macro (not the old ObservableObject/Published pattern), structured concurrency with async/await and withThrowingTaskGroup for concurrent batch fetching, and SwiftUI throughout — no UIKit/AppKit bridges except for the WKWebView wrapper via NSViewRepresentable.
Two APIs power the data: the official HN Firebase API for individual item/user fetches, and the Algolia Search API for feeds, filtering, and search. The Algolia API is surprisingly powerful for this — it lets you do date-range filtering, pagination, and full-text search that the Firebase API doesn't support.
CI/CD:
The release pipeline is a single GitHub Actions workflow (467 lines) that handles the full macOS distribution story: build and archive, code sign with Developer ID, notarize with Apple (with a 5-retry staple loop for ticket propagation delays), create a custom DMG with AppleScript-driven icon positioning, sign and notarize the DMG, generate an EdDSA Sparkle signature, create a GitHub Release, and deploy an updated appcast.xml to GitHub Pages.
Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.
The entire project is MIT licensed. PRs and issues welcome: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News
I'd love feedback — especially on features you'd want to see. Some ideas I'm considering: keyboard-driven navigation (j/k to move between stories), a reader mode that strips articles down to text, and notification support for replies to your comments.
I'm probably just a anti-app guy, but I tried it out.
First thing I went to do was CMD-F to search for some strings in the comments section.
Actually, the real first thing I did, was click on the left-side article preview on the text that said "1 hr ago | 63 comments" thinking it'd navigate me to the comments. See, I like my native hyper-links.
There will be a way to do user actions like upvote/comment/favorite/flag soon.
Congratulations on getting this out!
First feature request from me would be to adjust text size. I've start bumping up the default text size on all sites by one or two notches in the past year. Getting old, y'know. But also, as someone pointed out on a design blogpost a decade ago, why not make things easier to read. I didnt need it then, but I appreciate it now.
Really happy that I can run this on MacOS14 cause I've been locked out of some neat things people have built recently. Thanks for targetting older OSes. I'm not upgrading to the crap they've been putting out lately.
I'll be able to read details more later (getting ready for the job). Hope I didn't miss anything and comment about something that was already addressed. Congrats on shipping!
I've been doing this too; at some point I should probably just change the scaling of my desktop as a whole. But I like my high resolution, multiple windows layout too much to do it yet!
This is a good start, but I think a better approach would be to piggyback off of ublock origin's lists. Hopefully less maintenance that way too.
That won’t work. uBlock origin is licensed GPLv3 (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock), this code is MIT licensed (https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News).
@IronsideXXVI, are you open to changing to gpl v3? Otherwise, there is probably a decent set of filter lists with an MIT license somewhere. The goal is for you to NOT become a filter list maintainer, and by piggybacking off an already respected set of lists, you'd build user trust in your adblocking.
I don't necessarily have a ready solution to offer, but these are the obstacles preventing someone like me from being able to use apps like this comfortably and safely, especially knowing we are entering a transitional period where new apps are being vibe-coded every day and formal verification has not yet caught up.
Even if a given app has had every line of code reviewed by a human, or has well-defined interfaces that allow for sloppier internal code, how do I know that without cracking it open myself or asking an agent to help me audit it?
Also would be nice to be able store notes or short blurbs about usernames that will show up in the app. Maybe as a tooltip?
One thing: I really like the colors of Hacker News. It feels weird to me when Hacker News is presented in other colors. If I were to use your app I'd want to change the color pallet back to what it looks like on HN.
> Getting macOS code signing and notarization working in CI was honestly the hardest part of this project. If anyone is distributing a macOS app outside the App Store via GitHub Actions, I'm happy to answer questions — the workflow is fully open source.
Yes, in a past life I shipped a Mac application. This aspect is always a little bit of black magic. I will say that the Windows installer situation was a lot worse, IMO.
Btw, can you allow me to set the font-family, font-size, etc. for the interface? I can’t even do the default `CMD + +` to zoom in.
noprocrast + maxvisit + minaway on https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Brajeshwar is your friend for this :)
> In my profile, what is noprocrast? - It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on HN. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Also I appreciate how you made all backend calls just static functions which they always should be. People tend to overcomplicate these things and add a lot of boiler plate and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Going to try your app, thank you!
P.S. tried it, already miss the `threads` tab
This is sooo good.
Bravo!
A font size setting would be nice, I found the font is a bit small.
In other similar news, I've been working on enhancing the HN ux, but still in the browser as an extension. The current build up on the Chrome store is pretty stable.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/webpage
My only nitpick is I wish I could force dark mode on web pages with a light background, but that’s minor.
SwiftUI is something entirely different and not trying to be cross-platform at all.