Heading up to the 2010 release of Frogans technology, this month marks the 10th anniversary for STG Interactive S.A., the company behind the development of Frogans technology. We are very fortunate to have been allowed the time to develop a technology that is robust and scalable for meeting the full demands of the Internet community, and also to prepare our company for rapid, stable and long-term growth.

Frogans technology as a new layer of the Internet was conceived from the start to address the problems arising from the Web’s lack of simplicity and security for publishers, developers and end-users. These problems were already underway in the mid-90s. But if anyone else was alarmed, no one was taking the right fundamental steps: Superior integration of online content creation, browsing and distribution.

The principles of security, stability and neutrality apply not only to Frogans technology, but to STG Interactive also. We have always planned for the long term, whether it involves building an economic model, developing our industrial base, managing intellectual property or building our team, while respecting the legitimate and various interests throughout the Internet community.

Today, due in part by the Web browser wars, and now with the proliferation of networked device platforms, the Web is more fragmented than ever. The Frogans layer of the Internet will bring easy, standards-based publishing solutions for desktop, mobile and innumerable other devices. This is made possible through ten years of achievement and maturation – probably the Frogans layer’s greatest asset to date.

In the meantime, how about some candles?

Update Jan 5, 2009 – Parts of this post are now outdated. In particular, STG Interactive S.A. is interested in operating a .frogans gTLD, but not for distributing domain names to the public, even if they have frogans addresses. We see a .frogans gTLD as being a great asset to the security and stability in operating the Main Frogans Network on the Internet. I’ll have more details on this subject once ICANN finalizes its Guidebook for new gTLD applicants.

I’ve been spending time at the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) 32nd International Public Meeting here in Paris last week. For me it has been a chance to learn more about current Internet addressing issues, but also to talk face-to-face with domain name registrars about Frogans technology.

And it’s been a real eye-opener on the subject of generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Right now, twenty one gTLDs exist. These include “.com,” “.biz” and “.edu”. TLDs include also those of the country code flavor (ccTLDs) like “.au” for Australia and “.cn” for China.

Thanks to the New gTLD Program, the number of gTLDs is expected to explode. While the policy details are still being worked out by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), we can expect within the next few years a huge proliferation of domain name registries. The result will be that instead of registering “burger-and-fries.net”, it might be “burger-and-fries.fast-food”, where “.fast-food” has replaced “.net”, or “.com” or “.org”.

Not everybody thinks that this is good news. For existing registries it must be like scaling Mt Everest for a quiet summit picnic, only to find a new ski-lift bringing up folks by the twelve-pack. Not only do hard-earned gTLDs like “.eu” and “.jobs” risk losing some of their distinctiveness and meaning, but there are technical limitations to consider and administrative issues to untangle.

But it could also be a necessary evolutionary step for assuring a continued high level of innovation on the Internet. At STG Interactive, we see in this policy a reflection of our own point of view: that there must always be room for innovation on the Internet, even at the expense of “business as usual.”

It could even be a good thing for the Frogansphere. For instance, once the New gTLD program goes into effect, STG Interactive could apply to register the “.frogans” gTLD with ICANN. Imagine that for every one of your frogans addresses, STG Interactive could provide you with a free corresponding domain name. So with “frogans*burger-and-fries”, your corresponding domain name would be “burger-and-fries.frogans”.

This free domain name would be tied to a Web page for accessing your frogans. For instance, if you were to go to “http://burger-and-fries.frogans/” in a Web browser, a page could come up that contained a LeapToFrogans link to “frogans*burger-and-fries”. Here, the “.frogans” gTLD serves as a springboard between the Web and the Frogans layers of the Internet.

This idea sprung up after attending the Workshop meeting on New gTLDs. But in fact, STG Interactive could still move ahead with a similar idea if, for some reason, it were not possible to obtain a “.frogans” gTLD. STG Interactive might still provide each frogans address registrant with a free subdomain name under “frogansphere.net”, for example, “burger-and-fries.frogansphere.net”, and it would work the same way (even though it creates a dependancy on the “.net” registry). It’s longer to type, but still looks good enough to byte (pun intended).

…or, “Froggy goes to Mountain View.”

I wasn’t blogging from the Greater Silicon Valley Area from the 18th to the 25th of May, nor was I blogging in the weeks preceding. I wasn’t blogging the week after I got back, either. That’s a lot of not blogging.

The trip to the “Valley,” which included participation in the French Tech Tour 2008 was principally for evangelizing Frogans technology through presentations on the corporate level. It was also my first stint evangelizing in person, rather than on the keyboard. The main objective was to give others in the IT world a fifteen-minute overview (over the course of an hour) of Frogans technology and to give them reasons for finding out more.

To that end, things went pretty darned well.

Next up: FSDL C Libraries and easy frogans authoring.

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.

…on the outside, but within these walls, a thunderous roar of activity – making it sometimes difficult to get blog posts up in a timely fashion. I’ve been helping out on the Web pages for registering frogans addresses and for managing Frogans Addressing Service subscriber accounts.

Next week I’ll post a wrap-up of STG Interactive’s roadmap for Frogans Technology and the Main Frogans Network for a frog’s eye view of where we’re at, and where we’re going. Just in time for the holidays!

My inaugural post last May was entitled “Frogans Player beta expected soon“. It’s been but the blink of an eye since then, in geological terms. Can I see a show of hands of all the geologists out there reading this? Anybody…?

The Frogans Player is still under development. A great deal has already been accomplished, but for a beta to be ready it will take a few more weeks (that you can count on your fingers, not on your toes). Take it as an indication of the strength of STG Interactive’s commitment to the development of Frogans Technology.

The principal behind Frogans Technology demands not only perfect cohesion between its three pillars, these being the Frogans Player, FSDL and FNSL, but that this cohesion applies to users on each of the current three major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (x86). A frogans must look and behave the same on Linux as it does on Windows, as it does on a Mac, as it does on Linux. Without a glitch.

A very strong effort is being made to insure the functioning and compatibility of the Linux release of the Frogans Player. As rapid, robust and reliable as it must be on other operating systems, the Frogans Player for Linux must also be capable of adapting to the various system configurations and settings available to Linux users.

Running under Linux the Frogans Player must, among other things, be able to work with:

• different window environments, such as GNOME and KDE
• activation and deactivation of compositing window managers (for full alpha channel support)
• multiple display monitors
• differing system configurations during installation (personal, global and temporary installations)

The officially targeted Linux distributions for the Frogans Player will be Debian 4.0 (April 2007), Ubuntu 7.04 (April 2007), OpenSuse 10.2 (December 2006), Fedora Core 7 (March 2007) and Mandriva 2007.1 (April 2007).

STG Interactive will also test the Frogans Player under previous versions of theses distributions released since 2005 and will post whatever issues that we might come across in the release notes.

Since we’re eager to broaden the range of Linux configurations with which the Frogans Player will work, testing and feedback from users of all Linux configurations are welcome. If you’d like to test a pre-release of the Frogans Player for Linux, please contact me.

Inching towards the final stages of the development of the new Frogans Player, STG-Interactive has now started finalizing the Frogans Slide Description Language 3.0 (FSDL 3.0) specifications for publication.

This is the easy part, according to Alexis. It’s kind of like putting up the road signs now that the streets have been paved. Now that the Frogans Player has its rendering capabilities encoded, we’re establishing the means for telling it what to do. Working on the new FSDL feels like coming down the home stretch.

The last version to be published, FSDL 2.1 is looking more and more like that distant cousin that you knew when you were a kid, but who you saw less and less of as you grew up, and now you wouldn’t recognize if you were standing at the same bus stop. FSDL 3.0 is a major upgrade.

From what I’ve seen FSDL 3.0 will be a lot more intuitive, and simpler as well. I think that the new specifications will be a hair shorter than those for version 2.1, but no promises. More importantly, there has been a rethinking about how FSDL-created and associated elements are defined and placed in frogans slides.

In both the new and in previous versions of FSDL, resources, being associated images, vector elements , gradient fills and text elements (respectively SETIMAGE, SETDRAW, SETPIXELS and SETTEXT elements in version 2.1) are first defined so as to furnish something of a resource library. Each resource can then be used as needed, and in as many occurrences* as necessary. Occurrences can be resized, rotated, have masks and filters (e.g. blur, opacity, shadows, color effects, etc.) applied to them, and may be used themselves as masks for other objects.

In prior versions of FSDL the on-screen size of an image, text, etc., wouldn’t be defined until the moment at which they’d be “placed” on the frogans slide, in the CONTENT element, or applied as a mask for an other occurrence, in the MASK element. A CONTENT element occurrence would be sized with respect to an 800 x 600 unit grid representing the surface of a frogans slide (remember that in pixel units, the maximum rendered size of a frogans slide at its maximum zoom is 320 x 240). The size of a mask would be determined as a proportionate to the size of the occurrence that it masked. (The way of defining text resources, while simple, didn’t leave a lot of room for easy reformatting – but I’ll talk about that another day. Let’s just say for now that it’s greatly improved.)

It was agreed that a simpler approach was needed, so we worked towards the idea that the resources should be defined from the start with their sizes among their attributes, and that it will probably be in pixel units with respect to a frogans slide’s maximum zoom size (320 x 240). This follows the reasoning that people who publish frogans will generally think about their graphics and such in terms of the pixels they occupy on-screen and at their maximum zoom size. This runs somewhat counter to the idea that frogans are ultimately pixel-independent, which allows for their real-time resizing on screen, but it seemed to be a better way to go for easy authoring. Not only that, but apparently it has helped for more simple and concise coding in the Frogans Player.

Other neat stuff:

Goodbye SHAPE element, hello anti-aliased exterior contours. – The SHAPE element defined the general mask, or over-all shape, of each frogans slide, without anti-aliasing. This was reasonable before operating systems started moving towards putting semi-transparent objects in the user interface. Now it’s become the standard, allowing windows to have shadows and rounded, anti-aliased corners, widgets that look like they’re etched in smoked glass, and yup, frogans that have shadows, and look like they’re etched in smoked Waterford Crystal (let us not be one-upped by a mere widget). With all this transparency and anti-aliasing going around, the SHAPE element started being more trouble than it was worth.

Exterior shadows. – For the forementioned reasons, it’s groundhog day for frogans.

Type – The typographic fonts that you choose when you format your text will be from the selection of fonts embedded in the Frogans Player, and not those found on your operating system. This assures that the text in your frogans will be displayed exactly as you formatted it regardless of the end-user’s operating system configuration. You can be sure that your type will be displayed correctly if you’re writing in Cyrillic, Navajo, Kanji, Thai, even English. Someone remind me to publish the full list of international character sets one of these days.

Goodbye PID, hello forms. – FSDL 2.1 allowed for the use of a personal identifier (PID), or login, as well as a password if the author wished to restrict the access to a frogans. For instance, when you visited such a frogans a login window would appear where you would enter your PID and a password. With FSDL 3.0, a more flexible system implementing forms that are opened in separate windows has made this feature obsolete.

* I use the word “occurrence” whereas the existing FSDL specifications use the word “content”.

(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.

Okay, “soon” is a bit ambiguous. What’s most important is that with the release of the beta, the world at large, or at least those in the “know”, will have the opportunity to see some frogans doing their thing on-screen. With the concurrent release of FSDL 3.0 it’s likely that a lucky few will get a shot at setting up their own frogans on temporary addresses.