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

Luke Emmet luke.emmet at gmail.com

Thu May 28 12:22:07 BST 2020

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Hi All

I'm pleased to announce the first release of GemiNaut, a user friendly Gemini client for Windows.

Its written with a more "typical" end user in mind who may not be so familiar with the command line and would like a graphical browser to explore Gemini space. In particular, I'm interested in usability, cognitive aspects of navigation through hypertext - how to support the user in his or her understanding of where they are and what comes up next if they were to click on the links.

Some key features

Attractive GUI with familiar browser navigation features/keyboard shortcuts etc* Smooth content wrap and flow* Content theming engine - view the same content in different visual modes* Automatic site based themes - help to distinguish one site from another* Easily distinguish links outside of Gemini (e.g. to HTTP web servers) from the link style (fat arrow vs squiggly one)* View source

The theming engine is extensible - not quite drop in yet, but that is my direction of travel. It uses HTML for the actual rendering of the content, which allows for some innovation and experimentation of the possible options.

One element that is innovative as far as I know is the support for automatic "site-specific" themes. As you know there is no styling information in GMI documents, so it is sometimes difficult to know whose site you are on, and when you have traversed the boundary from one author voice to another. On the web each site has its own look and feel.

I wanted to explore the idea of automatic site specific themes, and the "Fabric" theme puts some of these ideas into practice as an initial pass. Each site gets its own simple look and feel as if laid out on a different fabric, like a tablecloth.

There are other themes in this initial release, including

Plain - simple, and effective, black text on white background, blue linksTerminal - for fixed width folk who like to live in the darkUnified - a theme that tries to bring together common navigational and search elements

You can switch between these as you go.

For further details, screenshots, downloads and source, please see the project home page:

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

Any feedback and further thoughts welcome.

Best Wishes

- Luke