Clippings

切抜 kirinuki — Clippings. A feed reader for the Mudita Kompakt's E Ink screen: text only, kept on the phone, no account.

A reader for the Mudita Kompakt, built for its E Ink screen: text on paper, no images, and everything kept on the phone. Feeds, and the smolnet — Gemini, gopher and Spartan.

Kirinuki is 切抜 — a cutting, the thing you take out of a newspaper with scissors and keep. 切 (to cut), 抜 (to take out). It is what this is: pieces cut from somewhere else and kept, most of them only as much as the paper gave you.

Fork of Feeder by Jonas Kalderstam, pared to a reader and rebuilt on Mudita's MMD design system.

What it is Three screens. The feeds, what is in one, and the thing itself.

No account, and no server of ours. Feeds are fetched straight from the sites that publish them. Nothing is registered and nothing phones home. Read with the radio off. Everything is fetched on wifi and stored; the reading afterwards needs nothing. Text only. No images, no embedded web view. A photograph at sixteen greys costs a redraw to say less than the headline did, and a page that drags in a site's own CSS is unreadable on this screen. OPML in and out. How you arrive with feeds, and how you leave with them. Volume keys page the article, because dragging a finger down E Ink is a poor way to read.

The smolnet gemini://, gopher:// and spartan:// open in the app and read like anything else. Nothing else on the phone opens them, so Clippings offers to — a capsule link tapped or shared anywhere arrives here.

Subscribe to a gemlog. Gemini has no feed format; the convention is that a page is a feed when its links carry dates. Subscribe to one and its entries arrive like any other feed's, with the text fetched at sync time, so a gemlog reads with the radio off. Certificates. Gemini has no authorities, so a capsule is trusted the first time it is seen and checked against that afterwards. A host presenting a different certificate before the known one has expired is refused, and the screen says why rather than quietly carrying on. Gopher text is fitted rather than reflowed — it was written against eighty columns, and reflowing it destroys tables and art. It shrinks until it fits, and scrolls sideways rather than shrinking past the point of being readable.

What it will not do for you Most feeds carry a summary rather than the whole article. Clippings will fetch the full text from the page and keep it beside the summary — and that fetch is genuinely unreliable, because it depends on a stranger's markup. When it fails, the screen says so and gives you back the summary. It does not show you half an article as though it were whole.