You know you want it: Hacker News * for iPhone

Run by Paul Graham’s funding firm Y Combinator,

Hacker News has grown to become a popular destination for news stories about hacking, startup companies, interesting technologies and trending topics. Actually, the site attracts over 120,000 unique visitors on an average weekday.

Given the site’s popularity, it really doesn’t come as a surprise that there’s no shortage of unofficial Hacker News clients for the iOS platform. Today, we bring the spotlight on Hacker News * (asterisk included), a clean, efficient and simple to use front-end to the Hacker News website…

The app is the work of Maximilian Mackh and it lets you browse popular submissions on the Front Page, where most of the up-voting occurs. It also supports browsing stories that get posted to the New & Best Sections.

You can read uncluttered versions of articles, which is achieved via Clear Read API (another Mackh’s project), post them to Twitter and Facebook, send articles to Instapaper and access them in offline mode.

You will also love built-in Dictionary support, excellent support for portrait and landscape and the ability to comment on articles in-app.

At first glance, the program delights with its elegant and responsive user interface and fast performance. On closer inspection, a bit more work is needed in the usability department. I’ve also noticed that the popular Ask category is nowhere to be found.

In all, for a 1.0 release Hacker Newz * ticks all the important boxes. In my opinion, it’s a must-have for anyone serious about Hacker News.

Hacker News loves our coverage of how text editing on iPad should be

Hacker News * for iPhone is a 99-cent download right from the App Store. Unfortunately, the 4.7MB download does not support the iPad natively (yet).

Hacker News * 1.0 features:

• Quickly preview submission
• Offline Caching
• Unclutter Articles via Clear Read API (similar to Readability)
• Post to Twitter
• Email Article
• Post to Facebook
• Send Articles to Instapaper
• Gorgeous reading experience in portrait & landscape orientation
• Font resizing
• Very light mobile data footprint (i.e. Fast)
• Optimized comment view in landscape
• Dictionary

Mackh is also behind an awesome RSS reader for iPad dubbed Read and a slew of other iOS apps. I’m also liking his Chrome extension that gets rid of all the clutter on the Google Search page.

If you’re unsure about this Hacker News client, you can glean more information from Lukas Hermann’s informative review over at MacStories.

As for me, I bought it as Hacker News is part of my regular morning routine and I often discover cool trending topics and really interesting stories there.

Do you frequently visit Hacker News?