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skyjake.fi

The Busy Phase

📅 2023-09-10

🏷 Life, Lagrange, Bubble, GmCapsule, Cosmos

Life has been busy recently, as you may have noticed from my lack of posts in the past month or so. I've been following BBS daily, of course, chiming in when I get a chance. However, when it comes to programming projects, it has been challenging to find time for any substantial progress.

The busyness is predominantly due to my younger son having turned 13 months, and thus now having become a toddler, insisting on walking nonstop inside and outside the house. This is a rather hazardous activity as he will trip and fall due to the slightest misstep, and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all. He absolutely loves to explore the neighborhood, but this means I need spend a significant chunk of my time looking after him while he's carrying out his expeditions. There was a similar phase with his brother and it lasted a few months. It was only after he become old enough to go to daycare that I reclaimed much of my free time. If the same pattern repeats, I'll be quite busy until January.

Lagrange v1.17 is shaping up nicely. However, there are a few features I've been wanting to implement for a long time, and I'd like to add them before making a release. There is no guarantee I'll have much time later for the planned v1.18, so postponing features could mean several months of additional delay.

As a brief preview, the "work/v1.17" branch already has these features:

• Updated capsule icon for "geminiprotocol.net".
• Previously submitted input query texts are remembered persistently, and can be restored later.
• User-selectable feed refresh interval (including "manual only").
• "Fold/Unfold All" menu action for bookmark folders.
• Search convenience: use a link as search URL via the context menu; search for selected text via context menu.
• Support for the Nex protocol (although not its document formats).
• Auto-scrolling while marking a selection with the mouse.
• Theme palette tune-ups, particularly for Colorful Light.
• Unsupported media types that are valid UTF-8 are automatically shown as plain text.

When it comes to Bubble, I've noticed a few bugs that need fixing in the near term. I also have a set of features planned for v7, perhaps most importantly a rewrite of the Subspaces index page that better visualizes actual subspace activity.

For GmCapsule, I already implemented a new feature that enables CGI apps that stream their output, although it comes with some limitations. There are a bunch of other useful improvements that should be done, but I'm prioritizing this below the other projects for now.

As for Cosmos: I've applied some manual tweaks, most recently to know about the new geminiprotocol.net capsule. I have no idea when I'll have time to make real improvements but the aggregator seems to be mostly working OK as-is.

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