[ANN] GemiNaut - a user friendly Gemini browser for Windows in C#

[Luke Emmet]

On 28-May-2020 16:29, solderpunk wrote:
> Thanks a lot for sharing this!  Even as a "terminal junkie" myself I am
> really happy to see more "user friendly" clients appear, especially for
> more mainstream platforms.

I think this will be important that there are clients out there for 
everyone.

> I am very excited to see that people are starting to explore the
> possibilities for client-driven styling of Geminispace.  Slight
> differences in appearance for different domains, and also for links
> into/out of Geminispace are both excellent ideas.  I'm curious about the
> blue and white geomeric icon shown in your screenshot for the "fabric"
> theme.  Is that randomly generated based on the hostname?  Is it the
> result of a failed favicon request, or is it always there in that theme?
This is a site-specific "placemarker" automatically generated for that 
site. It is the equivalent of a site logo, or something like that. 
Perhaps I might implement putting any favicon there if it exists. Each 
site has a different background "fabric" and placemarker. Together these 
elements help dramatically in my experience in finding your way around. 
You can click a link and recognise you have arrived at a familiar place.

The site placemarker is an active element. It will take you to the the 
home page for the site or user.

My concept of a site is that it is either the domain itself, or if there 
is a user specified in the path, then it is the user home.

gemini://domain1.tld/mypath.gmi -> site is domain1.tld for that page

gemini://domain2.tld/users/foo/bar/baz.gmi -> site is domain/users/foo 
for that page

This gives a nice overall approach that each user gets a singular theme 
applied to all their content, but there can be many users on a domain.

> Something no client has done yet, as far as I know, which I think would
> be great is to make use of the different levels of heading which are
> possible in text/gemini to automatically generate a "table of contents"
> for a long document which could be displayed in a side-panel, and allow
> immediate jumping to a particular location.  A lot of PDF viewers have
> something like this.  This was just as big a motivation for my decision
> to include those headers in the spec as that they look nice.  My hope is
> that with good clients it ends up being extremely easy to make
> geminisites which are very quick and easy to navigate or, at the very
> least, requires a concerted effort to make one which is hard to
> navigate.
Ah yes - it was already on my todo list, and I knew it wasnt going to be 
hard. I'm assuming you mean something like this :-)

   
https://www.marmaladefoo.com/vanilla/marmaladefoo/uploads/geminaut/geminaut_toc.png

I just now uploaded a new 0.8.3 version that has this implemented:

   https://www.marmaladefoo.com/pages/geminaut

> I would also like to see - and this is just my personal preference,
> which I hope people agree with but which I can't force anybody to share
> - better support in clients for bookmarking and for handling Atom/RSS
> feeds.  The mainstream web experience has tended towards people having
> their browsing directed for them, by things popping up on feeds hosted
> by (a small number of) other people.  There's obviously some value in
> this for content discovery and discussion, but I think it would also be
> nice if, along with the technical changes at a protocol level to
> discourage tracking, reduce software and hardware requirements, and
> generally remove bloat and clutter, Gemini could also be a vehicle for
> a "cultural change" toward (among other things!) more self-directed and
> self-paced reading.

I agree there are a set of cultural practices and expectations that we 
can try to shape with Gemini as a way of using the Internet. Finding the 
sweet spot is always a challenge, but I think there is good evidence of 
the general direction of our collective travel.

> But we'll see how that goes.
>
> Anyway, this looks like a great project with really interesting plans.
> Please keep us informed!

Thanks!

  - Luke