Zoxenpher & gopherspace - new features and an introduction to the gopher.

What is this gopherspace stuff anyways?

Gopher itself is a protocol for accessing information on the internet. Its similar to the world wide web in that respect. But in just about every other respect gopher is very different.

Gopher is made up of a system of menus, rather than many pages of html markup and complex scripts.  This first difference does mean gopher can run on a very low end system. I mean very low end, like the embedded system inside your smart toaster. Of course, not every gopher client is built alike, and they can very  wildly in what they support, and whether they even properly render it. (Arachne for example, a dos web browser, renders comment lines as links for whatever reason.)

There are gopher clients for Android, Modern PCs, web browsers, FreeDOS, and even the Commodore 64.

Gopher's simplicity and elegance may not wow with glamor or fancy styling, but its definitely useful when you need, say, weather reports when the power is out and you want to save battery by not running your web browser. or you want to look something up and are concerned about bandwidth usage. Or even if you just want to explore an online world that's a bit different for a change.



Zoxenpher: A gopherspace client.
Zoxenpher is a python/pygame-based gopherspace client.

as the screenshot suggests, it uses a multiwindow paradigm. (infact it uses a pygame windowing framework i had designed previously)


The gopher menus in zoxenpher now have gopher type icons for each link, as does a curious window hiding behind the large gopher menu in the center.

Bookmarks. It may not seem like much, but bookmarks can make or break a browser, and turns out thats true for gopher clients too. on top of the bookmark buttons visible in the menu windows, shift-clicking a link will let a user bookmark links too.

Zoxenpher has in-line image previewing and a dedicated image viewer when there are simply too many images to preview (default preview limit is 10)

The usual sort of small features like url entry boxes, help system, buttons to reload and return to the server root of a menu and so on, are also present.

Zoxenpher on github

Zoxenpher: A python/pygame gopher client.

Introduction:
Im not about to give you a history lesson on gopherspace, (perhaps that would be best in a separate blog post) but what i am going to do is introduce my gopher client: Zoxenpher

Basic UI:
Zoxenpher is powered by a virtual window manager framework of mine, Strazoloid-WM, and features a "desktop-like" UI paradigm. each "window" can be dragged via the title bar, and when applicable, resized via the extra bar at the bottom of the frame. the small square in the left of the title bar, likewise, closes the window.

Opening a gopher window is as simple as right clicking a menu link, or clicking the suspicious "new" button in the upper left hand corner.



Some other bits and bobs:

• Zoxenpher features image support, with in-menu preview of up to 10 images. (the remaining images can be opened in a separate window manually)
• Search queries thought gopherspace will open a query box when clicked, that will prompt the user for a search query.
• Zoxenpher isn't entirely finished, but it is more-or-less capable of browsing gopherspace.

Zoxenpher on Github