💾 Archived View for auragem.letz.dev › devlog › 20240505.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:57:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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It's been a few days less than a month since I released the first alpha of this project, and about 5 days more than a month since I started this project. Profectus has come quite a long way since then. The very first version lacked tabs, themes, spartan support, smooth scrolling, animated images, and had buggy DPI Scaling issues. All of these features have now been added since the first release, and the DPI scaling issues should be mostly fixed. I am very happy with what I've accomplished within a month.
This Beta 1.0 version has added some new things, mostly quality-of-life features and changes. In terms of general features, these were added:
For keyboard-shortcuts, the following were added:
Lastly, the theming system has been changed to be more consistent and more correct, a new default theme has been created to visually distinguish the beta from the alpha, and two other themes have been added that mimic Chrome/Chromium:
With the beta 1.0, I am reorienting the goal of the browser: rather than Profectus being a gemini and scroll browser, it is a document viewer that can utilize the gemini and scroll protocols. In the end, there is virtually no change in plans, scope, or functionality, as this is what most other browsers are. However, viewing browsers as document viewers gets closer to what they are *used for* - viewing documents, whether that be pages, pdfs, markdown files, text files, code files, epubs and gempubs, etc.
Gemini, Scroll, and Gopher are all *document*-retrieval protocols. A browser that speaks these protocols needs to be able to view these *documents*, and in fact, a document viewer should be able to speak multiple protocols, just like VLC can speak multiple protocols for playing music and videos. In practice, adding most smallnet document-retrieval protocols is fairly simple when the majority of the application is already in the rendering and organization of documents and not necessarily the protocol handling.
I am not stopping here with the beta, of course. I have big plans for future beta releases that will lead up to the 1.0 stable release. These include:
You can download Profectus here:
