gemini:// is the new gopher://

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Just the other day I was recalling gopher:// protocol to someone too young and not too geek enough to have ever heard of the gopher:// internet protocol. I remember liking it, and thinking how unfortunate it was that it wasn't a more popular paradigm. At one point I was using a gopher:// client that rendered the nodes as if they were 3D objects (think: totally 1st person shooter 3D file-manager) and back then that totally felt like being a futuristic-computer-wiz-in-a-sci-fi-movie, I loved it!
Why oh why have our desktops UIs DEvolved into even MORE flat 2D!?!? Really! "Flat-icons" is nowhere near what I had imagined 30+ years ago that our computing future would be like! The closest I've experienced since Gopher3D is the in-game menus on my Son's new Oculus head-console games!
GopherVR:


Anyway I was working on the IDE some, trying various public handlers of the IDE:

Code: Select all

revGoURL "x-man-page://2/listxattr"

in the message box did not launch the requested man page.
I fixed it so now it does, added Dav:, FaceTime: and Tel: too, just for the hell of it.
Maybe I should add HTCPCP: as well? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Tex ... l_Protocol

During the course of fixing that I went down the rabbit hole of looking at a lot of internet protocols and came across gemini:// which looks rather gopher-like but is in recent, active development and has the distinction of being the first new Big8 level usenet nntp:// newsgroup in 8 years (lol)! You can check it out via web-to-gemini proxy, but as a caveat I believe the content is meant to be rendered from markdown by a real gemini client:
https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini. ... nar.space/
example site/nodes:
https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/heavysquare.com/noise/
https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini. ... 22/01/07.1

Now I'm thinking about how a Gopher3D-like interface could be simulated with 2D via scaling and transformations, I think a widget extension could handle it very well.

I'd like to at least do some iTunes "cover-flow" like widget at some point. This would be a cross-platform widget ( I wish Apple had made a public API for using a CoverFlow view, but they never did and now Apple has gone 'flat' too) and would load an array of items assigned to it, each with properties like name and imagedata or svgdata, and would then be able to scroll through the picts, pre loading the next few to render into memory. Might even be able to do some 'reflection' effect on the pict items like Apple did.

[overclockedmind]

"Nuh uh uh! You forgot to put in the password!"