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:

Introduction
Installation
Usage
- Buttons
- Menus
Settings Requesters
Those deserving favour
Obtaining Voyager updates

Introducing Voyager 1.0

Voyager 1.0 is a freely distributable WWW browser for AmigaOS. It's range of features covers:

It's faaaast. On the average, Voyager outruns any other available Amiga Web browser by a factor of two.
Supports the full HTML-2 standard as described in RFC-1866, including forms. It doesn't want to be a reference implementation, though, and tries to make the best even out of malformed documents.
Supports many proposed so called HTML-3 extensions.
Supports Client Side Image Maps.
Supports Netscape-Level 1 (NHTML) extensions, including <center>, floating images, background images and text coloring (both RGB and named colors).
Supports HTTP access authorization.
Supports ftp, gopher and wais via proxy.
Supports news: usenet news reading and posting.
Document cache with optional automatic last-modified-date-based verify.
Versatile hierarchical bookmark system, allowing export in HTML format, menu selection and drag'n'drop sorting.
Full support for true color displays with V43 datatypes.
Asynchronous network handling. Multiple windows.

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 .

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.

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

The 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.