I was asked how to open an LTF (“Leap to Frogans”) file. An LTF file is what we call a frogans short-cut. It’s a small file that tells the Frogans Player to open a particular frogans site. If you open one in a text editor, you’ll see something like this:

<leaptofrogans address="frogans*Demo"/>

If you have the Frogans Player installed on your computer, then double-clicking on an LTF file will make the Frogans Player open the frogans site at the frogans address written in the file.

The only version of the Frogans Player that has been available was a Windows-only beta, released 2005. We’re no longer distributing it, but are currently developing the new cross-platform version (desktop and mobile). So for now, you’ll have to wait until the new Frogans Player gets released before you can really put an LTF file to use.

For more on frogans short-cuts, see…

- its application media type information on the IANA website

- LTF extension information at FileExt.com

- page 79 of the FSDL 2.1 Specifications (attn: FSDL 3.0 will be a major revision)

Frogans has been leading a double life. I’ve been itching to come clean for weeks, but didn’t quite know how to put it. Here goes: It’s not just for the desktop anymore!

That’s right. Frogans has always been intended to also work on mobile phones and other tiny-screened devices. For crying out loud, isn’t it obvious? With a 320 by 240 pixel maximum display size, you can’t say that the writing wasn’t on the wall!

That’s not to say that I haven’t been sincere about how cool frogans mini-sites will be on the desktop. It’s still as true as ever. No other format for online content goes so far for enabling harmony between browsing and other applications. The resulting visual and interactive persistence with frogans mini-sites is unprecedented. And don’t forget the benefits for security and end-user privacy.

And then there’s mobile. Even though frogans for desktop devices (running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) has the lead on the roadmap, getting frogans on mobile has always been a key objective.

Mobile phone and PDA technology is now at a point where these devices can do a lot of the browsing that used to be reserved for personal computers only. Even so, the Web is largely a hostile place for these little devices. Content has to either be specifically authored for them (e.g. WAP) or some kind of adaptation has to take place – proxy server rendering (skyfire), content adaptation, zoomable pages (iPhone, Opera Mini). Plus, unless you’re using WiFi, it’s often SLOW.

Frogans mini-sites, on the other hand, will be equally friendly to both desktop and mobile devices. There will be no need for authors to adapt their content for one platform or the other. They’re cool in both worlds.

The very same principals for making Frogans technology universal for the desktop – secure, standard, lightweight content, easy on device resources – make it ideal for mobile. This is nothing new. Check out this post from last year.

At the end of the day, the frogans mini-site format is simply universal. Although frogans mini-sites will first be seen on desktop devices, the same mini-sites can be visited from mobile devices as the Frogans Player versions for those devices become available. Think of it as a way of jumping ahead of the mobile Web game, or as leaping across the desktop-mobile divide.

Whatever the frogans you make or browse, it’s always going to be a frogans. You can be sure of that because Frogans technology development has always been guided by a set of fundamental principals, self-imposed by STG Interactive. The aim of these principals is to help assure a high level of user-friendliness and usability in a frogans, whatever the frogans that frogans may be.

In a sense, Frogans technology is open on one end, and closed on the other. It’s open with respect to the use of FSDL. Under the FSDL perpetual license it will always be free to use for creating frogans, and even for creating frogans authoring tools. If a software company decides to create the equivalent of Dreamweaver for frogans, that’s fine. There’s no obligation to STG Interactive.

On the other hand, if someone wants to make an alternative to the Frogans Player – say one that accepts larger images, or can detect the date and time on your system – forget it. Why? Because frogans don’t do that.

I can’t say it enough: Frogans are not widgets. I should add: Widgets are not frogans. Oh no. They should be so lucky.

Here’s a short list of annoying things that will tell you that something is not a frogans:

• If it doesn’t have a frogans address, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it opens up without you intending it to, then it’s not a frogans.
• If you can’t rescale it immediately to the size you like, or hide it, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it slows down the performance of your computer, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it doesn’t function and display identically regardless of your operating system, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it animates without your input, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it passes behind another application, or application window, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it downloads to your hard disk, then it’s not a frogans.

And here’s a list of things that will annoy your computer that a frogans won’t do:

• If it opens up an application unexpectedly, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it contains HTML, JavaScript or Flash, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it interferes with the functioning of other applications, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it depends on the functioning of software other than the Frogans Player, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it puts a wiggle in your walk, then it could be frogans, or it could be what you had with your cereal this morning.

Frogans do not use cookies per se. For storing a frogans’ session information after a frogans has been closed it may be written to an end-user’s system drive as a “session identifier”.

You can think of a session identifier as kind of a smart cookie. By default, a frogans’ session identifier disappears when that frogans is closed. However, if the end-user adds a frogans to their “frogans favorites”, sort of like a list of frogans bookmarks, its session identifier may remain persistent, available on disk for that frogans to consult the next time it is opened. (When you add a frogans to your frogans favorites, a dialog box appears informing you that in doing so, you enable session identifiers to be written to your local drive).

For example, the frogans that you’re browsing contains a chess game which you’re playing against a server app. Each time you make a move the slide refreshes, sending to the server a session identifier describing the state of the game so that the server can compose the chessboard accordingly on the refreshed slide.

It’s 3am and you have to shut down the computer before the game ends. A good night’s sleep will help you rethink your strategy anyway. If this frogans is not designated as a “favorite” the state of your game will vaporize the moment you close it.

Fortunately, you had already added it to your frogans favorites. At 5am, when you open it up again, it has the same size and placement on your screen as it did at 3am, plus it displays the last slide you were visiting before you closed it.

And what’s more, it will remember the state of your chess game, thanks to its session identifier.

“Frogans favorites” is more than just a list of bookmarked frogans addresses. By default a frogans always opens to its homeslide, at full-size, in the middle of the screen. Adding a frogans to your frogans favorites 1) puts that frogans in your frogans favorites submenu for easy access, 2) sets your Frogans Player to remember the slide, the placement on your screen and the size of that frogans from when it was last viewed and 3) allows the last session identifier to remain on your disk, like a persistent cookie.

The Frogans Player’s default manner for opening frogans helps assure that frogans be accessible without being imposing. Keep in mind that, when opened, frogans are loaded into active memory only. So there is no need to cache frogans resource files on the end-user’s local drive. This helps keep your system insulated from potentially malicious documents, and besides, why clutter up your hard drive with unnecessary files?

With the end-user choosing to list a frogans in their frogans favorites, it puts power to decide if session data is written back into their own hands.

We just call it the MFN for short.

My promise of a roadmap is turning up empty for now. Most of my time recently has been in finalizing the customer interface text for the upcoming frogans address registration service at frogans.com.

Background info

Key to Frogans Technology is the creation of frogans networks. The first of these is being put into place by STG Interactive.

The Main Frogans Network, which STG Interactive operates, and which is established on the Internet, is accessible free of charge and without restriction to anybody having an Internet connection, and having the Frogans Player (also free of charge) installed on their computer (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux).

To publish a frogans on the Main Frogans Network, one needs to have registered a frogans address ($12 per year, $20 for two years), and to author their frogans in FSDL, which is free to use and distribute.

On the Web, end-users employ Web browsers for hunting down pages, which are written in HTML, and bringing them up on-screen. Likewise, on the MFN, users employ the Frogans Player to track down frogans, written in FSDL, and bring them up on-screen. The Web and the MFN are both software layers, not to be confused with the Internet itself, which is a physical network.

To better understand how STG Interactive operates the MFN, let’s look at this frogans network in three, bite-sized chunks: its hardware and connectivity, its administrative applications, and its database server.

The hardware and connectivity

Servers used for frogans address lookups are called FNS (Frogans Network System) servers. Those for the MFN are clustered Linux servers hosted in a Telehouse data center facility in Paris, France, which is very convenient seeing that our offices are nearby. These servers are connected to the Internet backbone by two 1-GBps connections, one provided by Verizon Business, the other by Level 3 Communications.

To enable routing through these two different providers STG Interactive became a LIR (Local Internet Registry) at RIPE NCC, running its own Autonomous System (number AS39051).

This is already a heavyweight setup, but to be absolutely certain to be able to provide uninterrupted service world-wide at a high volume (that’s positive thinking!) a second data center location is being planned for 2008.

The administrative applications: frogans.com

Here’s where STG Interactive does business. Frogans.com will soon allow people to register frogans addresses of their choice (on a first come, first served basis), and to manage their accounts, including their address parameters for hosting and publishing their frogans on the Internet. (Every published frogans has its own frogans address.)

For now frogans.com’s front end is going to be in English only, but it has been developed to accommodate its translation into other languages to better address Internet community needs as its activity grows.

The database: FDB server

A scalable, high-volume, high performance database server capable of meeting the MFN’s needs did not exist, so STG Interactive invented the Frogans Database (FDB) server.

The FDB server backs both STG Interactive’s administrative applications and the FNS servers on the MFN, for continuous world-wide frogans address lookup service.

Today STG Interactive is capable of storing and looking-up one hundred million (100,000,000!) frogans addresses on the MFN. For comparison, there exist around 146,000,000 Web domain names worldwide (source: The VeriSign Domain Report).

STG Interactive looks ready to deliver the goods for well past the first growth-spurt of the Frogansphere.

Up until now I’ve jabbered a lot about how neat frogans are as elements on the desktop, how cool the authoring environment is, the groovy Frogans Player, how the revolution will be televised, etc. It was getting about time to write about that much-neglected third pillar of Frogans technology, the one you’ve all been waiting for, the Frogans Network System Language, or FNSL for the in-crowd.

Rather than being a post, I did it as a static page. So don’t wait another instant! Go to the FNSL/Frogans Network Fun Overview by clicking here!

Here’s a graphic for visualizing Frogans technology. It’s got three basic components which work together to put frogans on your screen. Frogans are authored in FSDL, and are accessed and viewed with the Frogans Player which employs FNSL for handling frogans address lookup and network certification.

I have a hankering to do a Wikipedia entry on frogans. It’s gonna go a little something like this:

Frogans

“Frogans” are windowless desktop environments for navigating the Internet. Access to a frogans requires an Internet connection and the Frogans Player, which is a client-side stand-alone freeware application designed to run on Windows, the Mac OSX, and Linux operating systems.

Among the aspects particular to frogans are 1) their access by means of a frogans address, a simplified addressing method by which they are located on the Internet over frogans networks, 2) their on-screen persistence, which keeps them on top of all other running applications, and 3) their scalability, such that their persistence need not interfere with other tasks.

Frogans, which are sets of “frogans slides”, can contain hyperlinks to other frogans (to be viewed with the Frogans Player), as well as to elements on other layers of the Internet, such as the Web pages (activating the end-user’s default browser), and email (activating the end-user’s email application).

Frogans are authored in the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL), which is based on XML. FSDL is free to use, and its specifications are free to obtain. FSDL documents provide the Frogans Player with the text elements, the image file references, and the image and text processing commands from which to render frogans on an end-user’s screen.

The Frogans Player locates frogans home slides on the Internet by means of a frogans address (ex: “frogans*myslides”). Simply put, the user indicates the address of the frogans that they wish to view. The Frogans Player sends a request to a frogans network system (FNS) server. The FNS server responds with the information about that frogans, such as its location and encoding, written in the Frogans Network System Language (FNSL), allowing the Frogans Player to bring it up on screen.

Frogans addresses are obtained from STG Interactive, the company who oversees the main frogans network, and who has developed and maintains the Frogans Player, FSDL, and FNSL.