Pocket Gopher

The Gopher protocol was a precursor to the World Wide Web. Gopher appeared shortly before the Web and was quickly obsoleted by it. Nowadays it is kept alive by a handful of enthusiasts, for its very real qualities and of course some amount of nostalgia.

Pocket Gopher is a client for this protocol running on Java ME (a.k.a. J2ME) devices. I wrote it because it was ridiculously easy, and because there isn't any other that I could find, at least not as of 2010-07-11.

(You may be looking for the newer Android client of the same name.)

News

2023-01-15

Pocket Gohper is mentioned in a link roundup!

2013-05-20

Silas, from the UK, sends a detailed compatibility report for the HTC Touch Pro 2.

2012-11-12

xFlirtEEEx, from Russia, reports compatibility with two Blackberry models.

2011-08-19

Haggi, from Ireland, reports compatibility with yet another device.

2011-06-27

Andrey, from Russia, adds two more phones to my compatibility list.

2010-12-14

Nick, from the US (I think), tells me Pocket Gopher runs on the Blackberry Storm 2, for certain values of 'runs'.

2010-12-09

Fixed text file handling (hopefully) once and for all.

Pocket Gopher now starts faster than ever.

2010-10-31

Pocket Gopher now supports search queries!

2010-09-05

A bug fix and much improved Go To... form

2010-08-27

Rauscher, from Germany, tells me Pocket Gopher works on the Nokia 3110 Classic. Yay!

Features

• Supports directories, text files, searches, images and Web links (via the device Web browser).
• Session history, basic back function and caching.
• Paginated display for large directories and text files.
• Navigate by URL or host/port/type/selector (thanks to Nuno J. Silva <gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg>).
• Works on any port, not just 70 (surprisingly enough, that's worth mentioning).
• Forward compatible with Gopher+.

Known bugs

Sometimes directories have an extraneous blank page at the end.

Compatibility

As of 2013-07-11, Pocket Gopher is known to work on the following devices:

• Nokia E5-00
• Nokia E51
• Nokia 3110 Classic
• Nokia X2-01
• Blackberry
  • Torch 9800 (OS 6)
  • Curve 8350 (OS 5)
  • Storm 2 (though it may be unusable there)
• Siemens C72
• Alcatel OT-606
• Samsung B2100
• HTC Touch Pro 2 (though it looks bad there)

It should run on any modern Java ME device, though. Compatibility reports are welcome any time.

Download

As of 2010-12-09, Pocket Gopher should be considered beta quality. It's usable, but needs more testing, epecially security-wise, since it keeps accumulating features.

• JAR (14.6K) and JAD files
• source code (22.7K) and built-in directory index

License

Pocket Gopher - a basic Gopher client for mobile devices
2010-12-09 Felix Pleșoianu
Some code and ideas by Nuno J. Silva

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

To do

• more testing
• code cleanup
• bookmarks
• saving content

Other clients

Firefox

(natively before version 4.0, or via the Overbite plugin)

Konqueror

(via the kio_gopher plugin)

Lynx

The famed text web browser supports Gopher natively