HackerNews

HackerNews is an open-source HN app.

About

• 💙 Written in Flutter
• 📘 Utilizes Riverpod for state management
• 📱 Tested on both Android and iOS

Packages Used

• 📦 Riverpod: For state management
• 📦 Dio: For network calls and caching
• 📦 Flutter Widget from HTML: For rendering HTML texts
• 📦 URL Launcher: To open URLs
• 📦 Infinite Scroll Pagination: For endless scrolling
• 📦 Connectivity Plus: To monitor network connectivity
• 📦 Google Fonts: For custom typography
• 📦 Shimmer: For loading indicators

Features

The app has two main pages:

1. Home Page: Displays the top stories.
2. User Page: Shows a user’s posts.

Navigation

• Clicking on the user part of a post redirects to the User Page.
• Tapping on a post opens the URL of the post.

Common Challenges with the HN API

1. Slow loading when fetching posts:
   • Used Flutter’s Future for asynchronous calls. While this improved performance, it wasn’t perfect.
   • Implemented endless scrolling to load more posts as the user reaches the bottom of the page.

See in action

Building the project

mkdir hackernews
cd hackernews
git init && git pull https://github.com/developeralp/hackernews
flutter pub get