SkimHN is a desktop client for Hacker News built with Node-Webkit, edge.js and C#. SkimHN fetches the front page stories and also gives you a quick summary of selected stories. The purpose of SkimHN is to get a quick preview of a story before deciding to read it on the HackerNews website.

For each story, you can also see the time you are saving (based on average reading speed) with a countdown timer.

Installation

Download the Zip file for the project, navigate to the folder called HiSum.App. Click on nw.exe. That's it.

Supported platforms

Windows 64-bit

Features:

• See a preview of the important phrases in the comment thread for a given story

• See the different users who have commented and see their comments for a given story

• See the top keywords in the current story

• Follow users and keywords. When you choose to follow users, fetching a page will automatically notify you if any user you are following has made a comment in one of the stories on that page. (and similarly for keywords you are watching)

• Get quick summary for individual stories

Installation:

Supported platforms: Win64
Not yet supported: Win32, MacOSX, Linux

Currently the app works on Windows 64 bit machines but does not work on 32 bit machines. I have not been able to verify if it works on Mac or Linux. Getting the projects to work on the unsupported platforms is, at least on paper, only as complex as getting the correct edge.node files in place under the node_modules folder. Any help getting the node_modules fixed so that the app can become truly cross-platform would be greatly appreciated.

See this issue: tjanczuk/edge#61

Notes:

On clicking the big blue buttons to fetch the front pages, it will take a good 10 seconds to fetch all the stories.

This is really a toy app I am building to learn about Natural Language Processing, so please approach with low expectations :-)