After switching to Ubuntu Touch on my phone for a daily driver, I realized that there was no app in the open-store (open-store.io) for UT that allowed you to surf/browse the gemini protocol. I’ve talked about gemini space and gemini blogs (called gemlogs) here before, so feel free to search among my other articles if you aren’t familiar with it.
In any case, I found it strange that a Linux phone didn’t have an app for gemini in the open-store, so I went web searching, and found an app made for UT called “Gem”. After finding it, I also found out it was in the open-store as well, but that I couldn’t see it in the store from my phone, because it was written for Xenial (UT 16.04), and my phone is Focal (UT 20.04), a much newer version. This lead me to search the open-store specifically for Xenial only apps, and I found that there were perhaps hundreds of apps that didn’t get updated from Xenial to Focal. Most of these apps will still work in Focal if a few of the underlying portions were updated, and particularly rebuilt with a newer version of clickable with the proper apparmor settings.
Hence, I started on a little journey to update some of these apps. I decided to start with Gem, because I needed it. For the record, Gem can be found here:
https://open-store.io/app/gem.aaron
https://github.com/Aarontheissueguy/Gem
The first thing I did was download the source, and updated the clickable information and apparmor settings. You can read through the really boring commit here, if you’d like – taken from my repository, but the edits were the same for the original gem app:
https://gitlab.com/alaskalinuxuser/Gem/-/commit/346b3f2ddaaa76ce001eb9d3abee9e17c08abf33
And then did a pull request. I waited a few days, but it never got pulled in, and I tried emailing the original author, but his email address came back void. I also noted that the original author has not been on Github all year, so I felt that the author was no longer working on these projects. I also asked around on the Telegram groups for UT, and learned that the author was no longer an active part of the UT community.
The UT community encouraged me to release the app myself, so I made some branding changes and released it myself. You can find my app, Emerald, here:
https://open-store.io/app/emerald.alaskalinuxuser
https://gitlab.com/alaskalinuxuser/Gem
I didn’t really re-code anything, just updated a few things and I changed the color from pink to green for the app icon and links, so as not to compete with the original gem application. Hopefully others find it useful, I sure did, and I’m glad the original author made the app!
Linux – keep it simple.