The frogans-widget question.

“What makes a frogans slide different from a widget?”

By the time Widgets hit the scene Frogans technology was already several years into its development. At first glance, the two appear to have a lot in common. Comparisons are inevitable, and that’s alright. After all, before widgets came along the only thing we had to compare frogans to were Web sites.

Both frogans and widgets (whether they be Yahoo! Widgets, Mac OSX Widgets, Google Gadgets, Windows Gadgets, etc.) are modular in appearance. Like most widgets, frogans are not encumbered with an application window. They “float” on your screen, having taken on the shape desired by their authors. Also, they’re relatively small, since like widgets, they are not intended to demand your undivided attention, but rather to blend in with other activities.

Of course, frogans behave on your desktop like no widget can: Frogans are user-scaleable. So if you think your frogans slide is taking up too much space on your screen, but you’re not ready to close it, you just scale it down to whatever size suits you, and place it wherever you like.

At the same time a frogans slide, when open and visible, is always at the foremost layer of your screen. This means that, even if you scale it down, it’s always under your fingertips, no matter what application(s) you are running.

Even so, you might still be tempted to say “Frogans: it’s a widget”.

But there are big fundamental differences. Frogans technology has been conceived primarily for navigation on the Internet, through interfaces that are at once highly accessible, and yet non-intrusive for the end-user. Also, a frogans can be made up of an unlimited number of slides, alowing each one an extended range for written and visual content.

That is to say, each frogans isn’t limited to a particular “look”, or a specific kind of content. You can navigate througout a frogans from slide to slide as you would through a website. Depending on how a frogans is conceived, it might even evolve visually to adapt to the content that it conveys.

Except for with a few browser-dependant formats, widgets are generally small client-side applications which are installed on a client’s computer. An individual can only have access to a widget from the computer on which it has been installed.

With frogans, the cross-platform (Mac OSX, Windows, Linux) Frogans Player is the only thing that’s ever installed. Frogans are exclusively accessible over the Internet. So, like a web page, they are instantly available to any Internet-connected computer. And since there’s no cache for the content, you never have to worry about malicious code being written to your disk.

“Oh, I get it. It’s a Web widget”.

Not that either. A frogans is absolutely browser independent. Sure, it can link to a Web site, which will bring up the primary-browser. But a frogans can also contain information and images that don’t necessitate filling up your screen with a browser window. This way a frogans doesn’t intrude your other tasks.

“But say I want something on my desktop that gauges my microprocessor performance.”

Well, there are widgets that can do that. Frogans technology has been conceived to be self-contained, non-intrusive and secure. That’s why a frogans doesn’t have access to your system. Even the typographic fonts thaty they use are found within the Frogans Player, and are not dependant on those of the system.