Easy to read layout (I find myself doing a lot of zooming and panning in Mobile Safari)
Download articles and sequences for offline reading
Comments that are easy to read, vote on, and reply to on mobile, similar to e.g. popular reddit apps
Free as in beer and speech
Welcoming other features that would draw users, too. I have to wonder if there are open source Reddit clients I could adapt, given the forked codebase...
I expect that forking a reddit client is the way to go for UI (if you don’t have any in mind, I think AlienBlue and Reddit is Fun are probably worth looking into for this).
Turns out AlienBlue did release their original version as open source, but the code is four years out of date! Hmmm.
Yeah, I would probably end up scraping the HTML. I filed a bug about .json being broken two years ago, but even if it were fixed, it seems that LW has quite a few customizations that the JSON output likely has not caught up to...
Imagining:
Easy to read layout (I find myself doing a lot of zooming and panning in Mobile Safari)
Download articles and sequences for offline reading
Comments that are easy to read, vote on, and reply to on mobile, similar to e.g. popular reddit apps
Free as in beer and speech
Welcoming other features that would draw users, too. I have to wonder if there are open source Reddit clients I could adapt, given the forked codebase...
I expect that forking a reddit client is the way to go for UI (if you don’t have any in mind, I think AlienBlue and Reddit is Fun are probably worth looking into for this).
For the backend, reddit exposes itself through json, which LW doesn’t seem to; e.g. http://www.reddit.com/user/philh/.json works, but http://lesswrong.com/user/philh/.json (and http://lesswrong.com/user/philh/overview/.json ) don’t. I expect clients to mostly use this, so you’ll need to rewrite those portions of the code.
Turns out AlienBlue did release their original version as open source, but the code is four years out of date! Hmmm.
Yeah, I would probably end up scraping the HTML. I filed a bug about .json being broken two years ago, but even if it were fixed, it seems that LW has quite a few customizations that the JSON output likely has not caught up to...