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

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 12:22:07PM +0100, Luke Emmet wrote:
 
> Any feedback and further thoughts welcome.
> 

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 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?

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.

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.

But we'll see how that goes.

Anyway, this looks like a great project with really interesting plans.
Please keep us informed!

Cheers,
Solderpunk

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