frogans*wrestling
frogans*catnip
frogans*geek
frogans*rockstar
frogans*digital
frogans*cheapstuff
frogans*freestuff

It’s 2008 and 98% of the good ones have already been taken. How could this have happened? Where was I when the light turned green? If only I had listened. If only I had taken action when the time was ripe.

Ha ha, but it’s not 2008. Not yet. There’s still time.

A frogans address is the frogans equivalent of a domain name on the Web, except that it’s easier to say over the phone, since you never have to worry about whether there’s a string of “w”s in it or not.

What frogans addresses and Internet domain names have in common is that they’re registered on a first-come-first-served basis, meaning that the really good names are the first to get snatched-up.

When you register a frogans address at frogans.com you indicate the IP address where your frogans root directory (containing your frogans resource files) will be located. This information is stored on a Frogans Network System (FNS) server so that an end-user’s Frogans Player can find and go to your frogans.

As you can normally have any number of directories on a hosting server, you can have any number of frogans addresses on the same host.

You can reserve a frogans address whether or not you already have a web hosting account. You simply update your frogans address account settings at frogans.com once you know where your frogans root directory is going to be. By the same token, you can change the host for your frogans whenever you like. You need only update that information in your frogans address account settings.

You can transfer the rights to an address to whomever you want, and the terms of the deal are entirely between you and the recipient. That means that if you paid $12 for a year’s registration of “frogans*rent-a-car”, and then decided that you’re no longer interested in renting whatsoever, you’re at liberty to transfer that registered address, along with the rights to renew it, to the highest bidder.

The kick-off date frogans address registration has yet to be announced, but I’ll be kicking myself ’til 2020 if someone gets “frogans*joecady” before I do. Hey, don’t get any funny ideas!

Coffee? Club sandwich? A slice of Rosie’s homemade pecan pie?

Frogans? Well why didn’t you say so in the first place, Hon? They have their own section on the menu. It’s right here:

• What is a frogans?
  • Frogans basics
  • Why indeed…
• Who’s behind all this?
  • About STG Interactive
• Is making a frogans reserved for big development firms?
  • Frogans FSDL Publishing – part1
• What’s Frogans technology?
  • To put it quite simply…

“They were saying that cyberspace should be designed by architects. I told them that it’s already being designed: by developers!”
- some guy at a party in 1994

I had to agree at the time that people who were used to designing buildings, bridges and bathrooms were under-prepared to impose structure in what we, at the time, called cyberspace. It was like proposing that jumbo jets be piloted by tour-guides. Just wacko.

We don’t use the word cyberspace anymore, because there’s rarely anything spatial about it. Under the “page” model the Web is a series of flat surfaces, each crammed with zones of information, each zone begging for your attention, enticing you to click and to find yourself on another flat surface, much like the one that preceded it.

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten

Back in the days when we used words like “cyberspace”, we had certain expectations of what the information revolution would bring. Since were living in a three-dimensional world where the information amassed daily was in a real three-dimensional context (TV notwithstanding), we naturally imagined that cyberspace would work the same way. What we got instead was an environment that was amazingly rich in content, but only two dimensions deep. There are 1,133,408,294 Internet users world-wide* crawling around on their bellies like reptiles.
(*ref: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm June 18, 2007).

In the real world we humanize our surroundings. We furnish rooms, not only with essential items such as chairs, tables and lamps. We also decorate them with objects that remind us of who we are and what we hope to become. We put pictures on the walls of our friends and family, and are glad to see our friends and family doing likewise.

When I first heard about frogans, Alexis and Amaury kept talking about how frogans can provide a way to really open up Internet publishing to the masses, and I must admit, I didn’t quite get it. Since then the Social Web has emerged, and it’s beginning to sink in: Frogans allow for a human dimension for publishers as well as end-users that’s hard to imagine on the Web.

It’s almost too simple: A principal idea behind frogans is that they can exist on your desktop in harmony with other elements. You can even have several on display and still go on with whatever else you’re doing. Or, you can zoom-up one or more to look more closely, navigate to another slide on the same frogans, or to another frogans, all without being obliged to lose sight of my other activities. You can treat a frogans much in the same way you would the physical objects that you’ve chosen to have around you.

I can imagine having an individual frogans for everybody I know, or at least care about. (I can’t imagine having a MySpace page constantly open, much less several.) I’m looking forward to the day that everyone in my family has published a frogans containing at least a recent photo, perhaps a whole selection of them, and a slide featuring text that rounds up everything that they’d like to share at that moment with the people on the other end. And I’ll do the same.

Suddenly my desktop environment has a vertical dimension. There’s a real world element to the cyberworld. I can stop crawling around like a lizard and get back to my human ways.

(Just as the door appeared to be opening up, it slammed shut again with the announcement from Apple that 3rd party applications for the iPhone will in fact be Web 2 apps accessed through Safari. That pretty much renders this post obsolete since frogans are browser independant, necessitating that the Frogans Player be installed on the device.)

In the New York Times today,

“When he introduced the phone in January, Mr. Jobs seemed unwilling to permit outside software development. He said that opening that door would tend to raise both security and stability issues that were unacceptable in the wireless handset market.

Last week, however, at the D: All Things Digital conference, he seemed to relent. He said Apple was looking for ways to make it possible for developers to create software for the iPhone.

A person briefed on Apple’s plans said that at its software developer conference this month, Apple intends to announce that it will make it possible for developers of small programs written for the Macintosh to easily convert them to run on the iPhone.”

The frogans would rock on the iPhone. It’s “wait and see” if the Mac version of the Frogans Player would pass the hypothetical iPhone stability litmus test, but for security I think we’re already there. Speculation is that third-party widget makers might get the right of entry, but as each widget is an application, each one would have to prove it’s invulnerability before being allowed the right of entry on to the iPhone.

With the Frogans Player on the iPhone it would be a single app, in this case a particularly secure one, opening up the iPhone to a potentially unlimited number of frogans with no supplementary security concerns. This would be a win-win situation for iPhone users, getting access to online content in a lightweight format, that is appropriate for a smaller display, and without the security headaches of so many other Internet software gadgetry.

In the meantime, the push at STG Interactive continues to be to get the Frogans Player up and running on desktops and laptops (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux). Eventually, the goal is to have a version of the Frogans Player for all Internet-supported devices that accept third-party applications by 2010.

It now looks as if the Frogans Player and the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL) 3.0 will support Bézier arcs. If you take a look at the current FSDL specifications at frogans.com, you’ll see that already in version 2.1 of FSDL you can plot points to create straight-line vectors that you could use for making outlines, color or gradient fills, and shape masks. You could also create rectangles and ovals for the same purposes using a simpler set of commands.

In FSDL 2.1 you plot the points of your vector within the <COORDS> attribute in the <SETDRAW> element by their x,y coordinates on a 100 x 100 grid. It’s a follow-the-dots approach to drawing that results in a form composed of straight lines joined end to end. Every dot is like a pointy corner. Bézier arc support gives you the capacity to smooth out each point to the degree that you wish by allowing you to plot “control” points along your vector.

In Adobe Illustrator, the vector art application of choice for most of us, this is done interactively with the mouse. It’s a lot quicker and easier than coding by hand in FSDL. Fortunately, there are people who write third-party plug-ins to enhance Illustrator’s export capabilities, and I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before someone produces a plug-in capable of producing FSDL-ready code directly from Illustrator.

Vectors can also provide a means to create data-driven images like charts and graphs in FSDL dynamically through server applications. By the same token one could conceivably develop a system for generating editable blocks of text in custom typestyles through writing the vector data descriptions for each typographical character into an FSDL document.

One thing to keep in mind is that a file of complex vector data might be larger than the equivalent image in a format such as JPG, GIF or PNG, and there will be set limits in the Frogans Player on the size a frogans (the FSDL document plus resources). So although simple vectors can prove to be very efficient rendering images, vector data in some cases won’t be a judicious replacement for bitmapped image files.