It still a work in progress, but my plan is to release it on the launch day of iOS 8, with a lot more features. Like a Today widget and a share extension which will allow you to post to HN right from Safari.
Work is underway on an API to do all of this. Nick and Scott are hacking on it about three feet to my right just now. The days of scraping are numbered.
YCombinator doesn't endorse Algolia's HN API in any public way, to my knowledge. This makes it just regular third-party API—reliable, convenient, better than scraping, but hardly ‘official’. (Yes, I'm being pedantic.)
It seems to in the sense that Algolia powers the HN Search at the bottom of every window, and they are co-branded on those search pages. Also, https://hn.algolia.com/api
I agree, but it's good marketing. It associates the act of searching with the hostname 'algolia', which seems to be in their interest (being that their tagline is "Hosted cloud search as a service | AlgoliaSearch").
Looks great, Thomas. If you'd like to use Diffbot [1] to generate clean content summaries of the links for mobile, ala premii, I'd be happy to hook you up with some calls. [1] http://diffbot.com
Edit: I started an Hacker News Swift scraper, which is what SwiftHN use now, it's called Hacker Swifter: https://github.com/Dimillian/HackerSwifter It's highly inspired from LibHN (https://github.com/bennyguitar/libHN) for the scrapping part at the moment.
Feedbacks and pull requests appreciated :)