Ember for Hacker News

A native Hacker News reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac — calm, fast, and built for everyone.

Ember is a SwiftUI app that reads Hacker News the way a native app should: threaded comments rendered natively, clean reading typography, a personalized first-run setup, full dark mode, offline reading, and accessibility treated as a feature rather than an afterthought. One codebase adapts from a tab bar on iPhone to a three-pane layout on Mac and iPad.

Highlights:

• Every feed — Top, New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN, and Jobs, switchable from a pinned filter bar.
• Native comment threads — Hacker News comment HTML is parsed into native text with tappable links, italics, block quotes, and code blocks. Threads are collapsible with depth indicators, and the whole tree loads in a single request.
• Smart onboarding — a short first-run flow that reads your device's appearance and accessibility settings, pre-configures the app to match, and shows a live preview as you choose a theme, accent, and home feed.
• Search — full-text search across Hacker News by relevance or recency.
• Saved for later — bookmark any story; saved stories are stored on device and work offline.
• Offline reading — feeds, stories, and comment threads you've viewed are cached to disk, so Ember keeps working without a connection and falls back to the cache automatically. Cache size is shown in Settings and can be cleared.
• Read tracking — visited stories are dimmed so you can pick up where you left off.
• Runs on the desktop — the same app runs on Mac (via Mac Catalyst) and large iPad with a native three-pane layout: a source-list sidebar, a story list, and the discussion side by side.
• Reading typography — body and comments are set in Inter with comfortable leading and a constrained measure, so long threads are easy to read.
• Adjustable text size — tune reading text in Settings, or pinch-to-zoom right in a discussion (on top of Dynamic Type).
• In-app reading — open links in an in-app Safari view with optional Reader mode, or hand off to your default browser.
• Share — a standard share button on every story (article or discussion link).
• Profiles — view any user's karma, join date, about, and recent submissions.
• Thoughtful design — a warm, hand-tuned color system, full light/dark support, six accent themes, haptics, and fluid animations.