Rainbow Lollipop: an experimental visual history web browser | Hacker News Reader

Rainbow Lollipop: an experimental visual history web browser

github.com

30 pointsmo18 comments

The way I understand that image: Each bar is the equivalent of a tab, and the linked circles are the visiting history for that tab.

The busy blue bar near the bottom shows that you visited six links, went back to the third link and visited four from there, then went back to the second of those four and visited one. The large size and white color of that one last circle means that it's what you're visiting now?

Or I'm totally off, and this is an alien interface in need of interpretation by Hoshi Sato.

You're right. It is rendering your Browsing history as Tree basically.

Yup except for the large image, you got everything right. The large image _was_ the topmost suggestion of autocompletion at the time. This one in particular was "search the string in the url-bar with duckduckgo". It does not exist anymore. It has been replaced with three neat columns that organize suggestions in a better way.

Can you post some video or something? The screenshot doesn't give too much.

I always wanted non linear history. Often a bookmark is not enough, I'd love to rewalk on the discovery of a particular page. Similarly, on linux, curl (IIRC) adds the source url to a downloaded file metadata.

I remember using Voyage [1], a Firefox addon to get timeline-like history view. Seems like it hasn't been updated in a while though.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/voyage/

I didn't think someone would wrote a plugin for that. Thanks. I would be good to revive it.

Here's an interesting approach to tabs

https://vimeo.com/9019483

Watching the video makes a lot more sense than my explanation!

Along with the usage of tabs, you have the concept of "sessions" A session is a collection of any tabs opened before starting a new session, by using ctrl+t. Using this will naturally result in collections of related tabs... You can then switch between sessions in a tree-style-tabs kind of way.

Watching the video makes a lot more sense than my explanation!

Firefox has, except for the vertical foldable list UI, Panorama (ctrl+shift+e to toggle between).

http://imgur.com/SNRLpxx

I always thought that nobody really used Vala anymore. Kind of neat to see it in use.

Most GNOME apps started today are done in Vala afaik. It’s just starting to get traction. Maybe not at fast as $HipsterLang, but steadily.

Didn't they choose JavaScript as their preferred language to write new applications?

They choose JavaScript as the preferred language for Gnome Shell plugins, afaik.

Correct. Regular applications are still mostly written in C, but newer projects tend to use Vala more and more.

Ask me anything about rainbow-lollipop

Well, I cannot compile the current version, nor install the deb. Using latest Linux Mint. It took some effort getting all the dependencies right, and it wasn't clear that I had to install the httpseverywhere plugin also provided on your Github account :)

While building, I get the following error that I cannot seem to solve:

CMakeFiles/rainbow-lollipop.dir/src/config_dialog.c.o: In function `rainbow_lollipop_config_dialog_construct': config_dialog.c:(.text+0x265e): undefined reference to `gtk_switch_set_state'

if by "latest" you mean the "rebecca"-release they advertise on their homepage, i got bad news for you. They ship with gtk version 3.10.x. The minimum api needed is 3.14.x . This dependency is available in mint since the "betsy"-release.

i just pushed a fix, so older APIs should work, too. Please pull the git and try to build again. Thanks for the hint :)

It worked, thanks!

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