A recent post looked at the most common uses of the web and then looked at gemiini to see which of those uses were available to gemini users. Things like chat and webmail were not. Maps were not available either. There are ways to make chat work using the gemini protocol, but an autorefreshing client would be required and it still probably would not be the best ever experience. But it could be doable. I agree with the original poster that SMTP and POP3 exist and there is no requirement to use webmail.

Gemini, Ecosystem? (original post)

Maps, on the other hand, seemed insurmountable. There is not the graphics support on gemini, not really. I suppose if you use a tile based mapping service you could, via cgi, combine tiles into an image and serve that image with the map lines and such, but it would be a poor substitute for interactive web maps. But this made me think about the fact that I very rarely need to browse around a map. It happens, but is not my common use case. My common use case is getting directions from my home to some other location that I have not been to before. Having a visual map helps process that information, but the turn by turn directions are often the star. As such, I have written a script to generate turn by turn directions served up over gemini:

gemdrive: driving directions for gemini

Because of the limitations of gemini input it does not support flags for no tolls or no highway or that sort of thing. You get what you get in that regard. It also does not support multipoint directions. Only FROM and TO.

When you navigate to the link given above it will ask you for your FROM address and your TO address separated by a `>` character. I have found that I get the best results when I provide a zip code. The directions/mapping source is Mapquest's OpenMap API which uses Open Street Map data.

While this doesn't fully check off the maps box listed in the original article, it may go some way to provide for a common use case.

I am still working out some kinks with the script to handle errors better and provide better messaging. At the moment most error messages are pretty generic and I am not including api error response messages. These will get added soon (I spent an hour or so on the script, so it is pretty slapped together at this point), but it definitely works in its current state for most valid addresses I have tried. It will also do directions from general areas: `Los Angeles, CA > Oakland, CA 94601`. If you do that search without any zip codes the results will be junk. But adding at least one zip code seems to get the job done. Remember to always read the route information before going out to drive. The distance and time listed at the top can be dead giveaways for results that do not match your intent (mapping from LA to Oakland without the zip code returns a result that is a journey of thousands of miles for some reason, but with the zip code is the correct 366 miles).

Have fun, good luck, enjoy.