…It works perfectly well at the moment.”

That’s a good question that I was asked in a recent exchange, and it inspired me to write this post.

A Swiss Army Knife doesn’t replace a toolkit. But who wants to lug around fifty pounds of wrenches and hammers all day?

Simple + secure + cohesive = captivating

The idea of Frogans technology is not to reinvent the Web, nor to replace it, but to provide end-user with a complimentary way to interact with online content that takes user-friendliness to a new level.

Simple

Two elements omnipresent in Web use encumber the end-user: The browser window and URLs. Frogans don’t employ application windows. Every frogans is its own entity on your screen, each being identified by its single frogans address, each containing a potentially unlimited number of slides. Navigate within a frogans, between different frogans, or between a frogans and other layers of the Internet, such as the Web or email.

Frogans addresses simplify frogans navigation. Rather than being tied to hosting-provided IP addresses and their subdirectories, frogans addresses are singular names chosen by the frogans publisher for each of their frogans. This allows the publisher more flexibility with their hosting options, and the end-user less complexity for navigating.

Secure

FSDL (Frogans Slide Description Language), though compatible with all server-side applications, is the only language in which you may author and develop a frogans, and allows no executable scripts, meaning that the end-user can expect more security against malicious online content.

There is no hard disk cache for frogans resources (FSDL, GIF, JPG and PNG). These are loaded into active memory only, isolating them from your system’s resources.

Frogans addresses are looked up and validated through digital signatures in FNSL (Frogans Network System Language) between the end-user’s Frogans Player and frogans networks.

Cohesive

The three pillars of Frogans technology, FSDL, FNSL and the Frogans Player (for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), work together in complete harmony with the singular goal optimizing the end-user’s navigating experience.

Captivating

Suddenly the end-user can maintain persistent contact with online content without sacrificing the functionality and security of their computer. User-scaleable frogans blend in with your desktop environment. No model for this kind of interactivity exists on the Web.

In advance of the Frogans Player release STG Interactive is going to produce a free AJAX-driven frogans development utility, called the FSDL Online Validator.

The FSDL Online Validator will allow you to write and edit FSDL 3.0 code, and render it as a frogans slide directly in your Web browser. You can start from templates and code examples, or work from scratch. You can even temporarily upload your own image files to use in your frogans slides. To save your work, copy and paste your code into a text editor document. This way, you get to try your hand at FSDL before the Frogans Player becomes available, and start building your own library of FSDL documents and code samples.

Features in the FSDL Online Validator will include:

• Live button roll-overs: Rendered buttons in your frogans slide will react to your mouse as they will in the Frogans Player
• Two size views: See your slide at its maximum (320 x 240 pixel grid) and minimum (80 x 60 pixel grid) sizes simultaneously
• Resource views: Preview your resources (image files, polygon images, text) separately
• Parsing-error messages: Should there be errors in your code, you will know where, and why
• Multi-language support: Choose the language in your interface, including parsing-error messages
• Frogans Player rendering conformity: Rendering is handled by the rendering engine from the Frogans Player

I should specify that what you create and view in the FSDL Online Validator are not complete frogans, but individual frogans slides. How a slide appears is an important aspect of what makes a frogans. But a frogans comes to life when it’s viewed and navigated. It’s an online desktop experience that’s completely apart from what is possible through a Web browser.