VOYAGER 1.0


Voyager

You Are Going Places!

Copyright © 1995-96 Oliver Wagner
(owagner@lsd.wupper.de)
All Rights Reserved.

See About Voyager
for full license information!
· Goto Voyager Web page · Goto Voyager-NG page · Goto Vaporware general home page ·

Contents of this document:

Introducing Voyager 1.0

Voyager 1.0 is a freely distributable WWW browser for AmigaOS. It's range of features covers: Voyager 1.0 is released now as a free gift to the Amiga community. Our main development efforts are currently gearing towards the release of Voyager 2.0 (our internal name is "V - Next Generation"), which is currently in alpha stage. You can find more information about V-NG on the Vaporware V-NG page.

Using the Voyager Installer

This is a basic outline of what the Voyager installer does:

1) Asks & Makes Target Directory if not there
2) Copies and/or Updates with Backup the Voyager Binary
3) Copies Needed MUI parts
4) Copies Docs

The Voyager installer is based around the installer binary versions 1.24, 2.17 and 43.1. If you do not have one of these version it would be best to upgrade now. Installer 2.17 can be found on some of the OS 3.x install disk. 1.24 and 43.1 are on aminet.

For more Information on the Vapor installers and direct pointers to the files you can visit the Vapor Installer home page .

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Usage

Action buttons

The main interface of Voyager is simple. The row of large buttons across the top of the window has some essential functions assigned to it. Many of which are self explanitory but we'll go through them anyway. Note that these buttons turn to a black and white version of their coloured form when it's not possible to activate their particular function at that time. The Voyager active indicator in the top right, displays the bouncing ball animation while Voyager is busy. Clicking on this will also reveal Voyager's About page.

Back

Fetches the previously accessed page. It wont, however, return to pages which resolted from Form send requests since they were temporary. Instead Voyager will skip this page for the last 'real' page.

Forward

This button will only work if the Back button has been used at least once. If the Back button has been used multiple times, so the Forward button will be usable an equal amount of times.

Home

This button sends Voyager to the configured Home Page. The Home Page is set up from the Links section of the GUI settings. The GUI settings is accessed via the settings menu or the Amiga-G hot-key. See the section on Settings.

Reload

This button will force V to reload the current page. Technically it will delete the current cached entries for that page and attempt a reload of the page with a special no-cache flag. This will force proxy caches to fetch the page afresh rather than use their cached page. See the section on Proxy.

Images

This button is only active if the 'Load HTML Images Directly' flag is turned off. This flag is present in the settings menu and can also be toggled with the Amiga-I hotkey. When this flag is off, Voyager will only load the images when the Images button is pressed. This allows very quick browsing with viewing of in-lined pictures and such forth viewed only when you want.

Find

Not yet implemented in the freeware version of Voyager

Print

Prints the current page out the the PRT: device. Only the text which can be seen in the page will be printed, no HTML codes etc.

Stop

Voyager will allow you to cancel downloading of a page and it's associated in-line images by pressing on this button. Loading of the page can be restarted with the Reload button if necessary.

Location:Location

This text gadget displays the current URL being accessed by Voyager. When not active it is denoted as 'Location:' but when activate you'll see a bold 'Goto:' appear. A URL can be entered with any fetch method by hand. If no fetch method is chosen IE www.cu-amiga.co.uk is entered, Voyager will automatically assume and add http:// in front of the entry. To the right of the URL text gadget are two buttons. The first is a pop-up button which will display the current entries in the stack since Voyager was activated during this session (and not the entire cache). Next along is a button with 'ADD' written on it. This will Bookmark the current page being viewed. For more information on this, see the section on the Bookmark.

Fastlink buttons

Lastly, the group of elongated buttons just above the main Voyager viewing window are user configurable fast links. Their presence can be turned off my the 'Show FastLinks' gadget in the Settings menu. The Fastlinks are edited from the Links page in the GUI Setting activated from the GUI function in the settings menu or again, the Amiga-G hotkey.

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The Menus

Voyager
About
Shows the Voyager About page. Hotkey Amiga-?
Cache List
Directs Voyager to a special internal page which displays the contents of the on disk cache. This has a special format; Age, Size, Type and URL are the resulting fields. Age is the cache elements age in days. The size is the size of the cache element in bytes, type indicates what form the file is whether text or image etc and finally URL is a link to the actual page to which the cache element belongs. Hotkey Amiga-C
Quit
Asks Voyager to Quit when it is next able. Hotkey Amiga-Q
Windows
Open New Window
Instructs Voyager to open a completely new Voyager task window. This will have all the hallmarks of the original Voyager window and is subject to MUI's settings by itself which means it can be directed to another screen as needs be. It will operate asynchronously to the spawning Voyager window. Hotkey Amiga-O
Open Local File
Results in a file requestor which expects a local HTML file to be chosen which Voyager will then display as normal. Hotkey Amiga-H
Show Current Document's Source
This option opens a new window with the raw HTML source code present inside. Again this is asynchronous and Voyager can carry on as normal. Hotkey Amiga-X
Save as HTML
Opens a file requestor to save our the current page in it's original HTML format. This can be viewed later with the Open Local File option. Hotkey Amiga-W
Save as ASCII Text
Opens a file requestor to save out the current page. The difference is that all HTML codes are removed from the document and only text which would be seen as normal by viewing the page in Voyager will be saved to a file. Hotkey Amiga-T
Activate other Voyagers
Here there will be an entry for every active Voyager window. By selecting any of them, this window will be made active and popped to the front. The current URL of each window is displayed along with the number of the Voyager window.
Bookmarks
Open Bookmarks
Opens the Bookmarks GUI. See the page on Bookmarks. Hotkey Amiga-B
Goto Bookmarks
Directs V to a special internal page which lists all of Voyager's bookmarks in the main listview. The links can be clicked on to direct Voyager to those particular pages.
BookMark Custom
Here you can configure a selection of URLs to be present in this menu via the Bookmark function.
Settings
GUI
Opens the GUI options window for configuring GUI aspects of Voyager. See the GUI settings page. Hotkey Amiga-G
Network
Opens the Network options window for configuring Networking aspects of Voyager. See the Networking settings page. Hotkey Amiga-H
Show Fastlinks
Toggles the Fastlink buttons at the bottom of Voyagers control panel. The Fastlinks buttons are custom configured in the GUI settings page.
Load HTML Images Directly
With this option on, Voyager will automatically load all the current in-line pictures in any pages loaded. With this option off, Voyager will not load the images and instead will wait for the Images button to be pressed. Hotkey Amiga-I
Autoview Images/Anims/Audio
Downloaded data can either be saved out, will occur if this option is turned off, or automatically piped to Multiview if this option is enabled. Hotkey Amiga-V
Ask for Downloads
If the Autoview Images/Anims/Audio option is disabled, this function has an effect of prompted a path every time data is to be saved out, otherwise it will be saved right away to the default download directory. Hotkey Amiga-D
User Access Authorisation
If this option is enabled, Voyager will send the username and password for every HTTP access. This is of use for secure sites where access to certain areas is restricted unless the user is known to the server. Hotkey Amiga-A
Set Authorisation Parameters
This fuction brings up a simple GUI allowing the username and password to be entered for the Access Authorisation function of Voyager. Hotkey Amiga-S
MUI Settings
Activates MUI's preferences program to work specifically on the Voyager window which activated the settings via this menu options.

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The Bookmarks

Bookmarks

The bookmark GUI is activated by selecting Open from the Bookmarks menu or pressing the Amiga-B hotkey combination. From here URLs can be added, deleted and edited as your own WWW phone book. Entries made here can be doubled clicked upon to direct Voyager to that page but more commonly, they can be accessed via the Bookmarks page which is activated by selecting Goto BookMarks in the Bookmark menu or alternatively the Amiga-G hotkey.

In addition to this, there's a button on Voyagers control panel marked 'Add'. Pressing this will add the current page directly in as the last entry in the Bookmarks GUI.

The Bookmark editor has a small listview showing the heirarchy of marked pages (which is neatly displayed in the same way via the Internal Bookmark Page). A new Group can be added and named with the New Group button, Hotkey G. It can not have a URL assigned to it though. This is the name of a group which is named to house particular types of Bookmarks. For example we might want to keep Amiga related pages in a Group called 'Amiga WWW pages'. Click on NewGroup, call it 'Amiga WWW pages' and then add any pages underneath either by hand with the NewBookmark button (Hotkey B) or by navigating to them via Voyager in the normal fashion and clicking the 'Add' gadget on Voyager's control panel. It couldn't be easier. Groups and Bookmarks can be duplicated with the Duplicate button (Hotkey D) or Removed with the Remove button Hotkey R.

One Group may also be nominated as a Menu Group with the Menu button, Hotkey M. All Bookmarks in this group will appear at the bottom of the Bookmark menu and when selected from the menu will navigate Voyager to those pages.

Internal Bookmark Page
The Internal Bookmark Page, activated by the 'Goto Bookmarks' function in the bookmarks Menu, only requires a click on the name of a URL to navigate Voyager to those areas. The entry made in the Bookmarks GUI is named accordingly to the entry inserted in the BookMark GUI's 'Title' box where as the actual URL relating to this page can only be seen at the bottom of Voyager's screen with the mouse hovering over the link. The actual URL is entered into the Bookmark GUI's 'Name' box.

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GUI Settings

There's 4 sections to the GUI settings window. Each are present as pages, just click on the exposed tags of each page to move to them. Here's how they work;

Layout
The only gadget present is Action Buttons. This only has three settings. They control the look of the Action Buttons at the top of the Voyager control panel. By default this is set up for Text and Icons so that the Action Buttons will be comprised of picture icons with a descriptive line of text labelling each one. Obviously text only means the buttons will be only made out of text and Icon's only does away with the text line. This function is useful if your screen is fairly small such as PAL screenmode users.

Color
This page allows you to customise the colours of various aspects of Voyager. The background color is the colour of the standard background Voyager uses when no background image is present in a HTML page. Text color is the default text color normally being black. Link color is the color of a link which hasn't been seen yet, normally red. Followed Link color is the color of a link to a page which has already been seen, normally blue. Image Link color is the color of the text shown before an Image is loaded, normally grey. Click on the color bar will bring up a palette GUI which enables precise control of the color used.

Fonts
This page allows you to change the fonts used by Voyager to render the text in the HTML pages. Pay specific attention to the increasing fonts sizes of the Headline fonts. They are usually preportional which gives a more pleasing result than a non preportional font. The so-called Fixed Font must be a non-preportional font since this is used where this effect is relied upon to format text in a prespecified way.

Links
Finally the links page allows editing of the Home Page and Fast Links. The Home Page URL entered here will be the first page Voyager attempts to load when first started. This URL will also be navigated to when you click on the Home Action Button. The Fast Links represent the entries for the Fast Link buttons on the bottom of the control panel. Note that these can be turned off by the Show Fastlinks switch in the settings menu. The Label will be the text shown on the buttons while the URL text box refers to the URL Voyager will attempt to load when that Fast Link is clicked upon.

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Network Settings

The Network Settings GUI is brought up by selecting Network fromt the Settings menu. There are three pages to this window which affect Voyager's behavior as far as it's network connection. To move to each section, click on the labeled exposed ear of the relevant page.

Proxies
This setting depends very much on your provider and/or your location. If your provider has a WWW proxy cache of it's own then you would be well advised to configure it here to enhance the performance of Voyager even further. You'll need to know the name or IP address of the proxy server and fill this in at least the HTTP box. The port number is also essential. Normally this is 80 but you must be sure of this value as proxy will not work if it is incorrect. Enter the name and port for the remaining FTP, Gopher and WAIS text gadgets unless you specifically want to use seperate proxy servers for those functions of Voyager.

Cache
This text gadget allows you to set the total size of the on-disk cache Voyager will uses. When Voyager is started, it will scan the Cache directory (called Cache within the Voyager directory) and delete the oldest records in order of age until the total size of the on-disk cache is less than the selected size. Note that the size is in kilobytes. A value of 512 is 512K or half a megabyte. To enter a 10MB on-disk cache, enter 10 x 1024 or 10240 in the text gadget. The Verify Cached Documents flag will instruct Voyager to enquire as to the status of a cached document when a document is requested which is present in the on-disk cache. With this function enabled, Voyager will verify that the page has not changed since the cache entry and so you will never be left with an out-of-date page in the cache. This option is recommended.

News
Here the news server for the News: function of Voyager is defined. Without a valid NNTP server here that you have access to, you will not be able to access Usenet news via Voyager. Normally your provider will have it's own NNTP news server. If you don't know the name, ask your provider. The Dumb NNTP Server flag needs to be set if you have problems without this option. Normally Voyager will try and request a list of newsgroups to a pattern. IE News:comp.sys.amiga.* but several news servers do not understand this format. If this is the case and an error is reported, turn on this flag in which case Voyager will request a full list and then show the pattern matched result by calculating it internally. It will result in a much longer download but it will work. Be sure and add your Email address and real name in the gadgets provided for this. In addition you may creat a signature that will be appended to your posts to usenet newsgroups in the signature form area.

Other
This tab currently supports helpers for "mailto" and "telnet" protocols. These should be configured for whichever apps you wish to have invoked upon clicking on a mailto: or telnet: link.both protocols support %h for the host, and telnet supports %p for the port number.

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Obtaining Voyager Updates

Voyager Updates are available at the Vaporware Support Site