Still talking about the frogans address. In the post down below I was talking about how frogans addresses can indicate frogans families, and the implications of such when browsing: If a frogans being visited has family members on the net, the end-user can open them up directly from that frogans’ contextual menu (right-click, or ctrl-click on a Mac).

The frogans address simplifies browsing in another way that I haven’t yet talked about. It simplifies your browsing history.

When surfing about on the Web your browser caches the URL of every page you’ve recently been on so that you can trace your steps under the History menu. We’ve all been there: Depending on your activity, a week’s worth of URLs can be a big messy list. I wonder how often people just skim that menu for any page on the site that they’re looking for, and then navigate from there? “Fairly often” says I, and if you think I’m way off mark, leave a comment (anybody?).

Browsing back by frogans addresses (a pleasure that, alas, can only be done in the frogansphere) involves less rummaging. Every frogans you visit opens up on its home slide. Addresses for other slides within a same frogans do not exist.

“WHAT? I can’t type in the exact slide that I want to see without going through the navigation?” Relax, and think about some of the things you get back in the trade-off:

• Frogans addresses maintain a nice and concise format. No crazy long URLS with subdirectories and unintelligible variables in the frogansphere.
• Tracing back your steps won’t make you dizzy.

The Frogans Player contextual menu contains a list of your recently visited frogans, which is in effect a list of recently looked-up frogans addresses. Since a frogans address refers to an entire frogans as a whole, and not to individual slides, this list is going to be much quicker and cleaner than what you’d expect in a Web browser.

I’m not saying that the history menu in Web browsers is for the birds. Web pages often contain amounts of information that wouldn’t be appropriate in the smaller frogans format, so it makes more sense on the Web to be able to find an individual page without considering its context within a site.

That the frogans address refers to the entire frogans should help remind frogans publishers of the importance of the context of each frogans slide within a frogans. This in turn should boost the functionality of browsing frogans backwards and the frogansphere in general through encouraging cohesiveness of content in frogans overall.

There may be those who will be quick to believe that a frogans address is little more than a dressed-up URL, that it exists merely as a mechanism for financing Frogans Technology development and the MFN (Main Frogans Network). Hogwash, I tell you. Dare I suggest that with frogans addressing we’re witnessing yet another step up the IT evolutionary ladder?

While ultimately frogans FSDL documents and other resources that make up frogans are transferred by HTTP, as Web pages are, the implementation of the frogans address as intermediary adds a layer of usability for the end-user and convenience for the publisher, leading to all-around functionality for everybody.

For end-users, they access frogans using a format of addressing that is really simple (ex: “frogans*example“, or “frogans*example.extension“). If only the Web were so easy. Ever copy and paste a URL only to have left out the “h” in “http://”? Or you’ve typed two “w”s instead of three? Or how about trying to recite a complete URL over the phone, and finally saying “Oh, I’ll send you an email…”

For frogans publishers the convenience of the frogans address is in its flexibility. The address of a frogans is independent from where on the Internet its resource files are physically located. A frogans address stays the same regardless of where its frogans is hosted, at what IP address or domain name, or in which directory. That information is instead kept in the registrant’s frogans address settings, and can be updated at any moment – and without the kind of delay that you get when, say, you want to redirect your domain name.

If a publisher of frogans so chooses, they can group frogans together in the frogans’ contextual menu by their addresses. This is done by giving different frogans a common “frogans family name” in their frogans address, and differentiating them with personalized extensions.

Remember way back when, two paragraphs ago, when I gave as an example “frogans*example.extension“? Here “example” is a frogans family name. “extension” is its extension (duh). The person who has registered “frogans*example” or “frogans*example.extension” has the exclusive right to use “example” as a family name in as many other frogans addresses as they like, each having its own extension:

• frogans*example.butterflies
• frogans*example.fish
• frogans*example.nets
• …

When you visit a frogans, the Frogans Player will detect the addresses of other frogans sharing the same family name and display them in the contextual menu of the frogans being visited. This is useful for associating different frogans thematically, particularly if it is desirable to quickly have a several different frogans family members on-screen simultaneously.

Don’t confuse the extension with a subdirectory. They have nothing in common. The frogans address extension denotes a unique frogans address for an entirely unique frogans. Different frogans in the same frogans family don’t even have to have the same hosting, for instance. Hop away, little frogans. Be freeee!

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.

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!

Nowadays, more individuals than ever are publishing personal content online. User generated content seems to be taking over the Web with services which allow people to set up their own pages, spaces, blogs and mashups without having to deal with a lot of code. Still, there are plenty of folks taking the hands-on approach for complete control of their subject matter. In any case, the Web is an environment very much shared by commercial entities and developers, and by individuals publishing content pertaining to their personal interests.

Things will probably be much the same in the frogansphere of the Internet. While Frogans technology opens up plenty of opportunities for enterprises, the door is also wide open for people who want to express their personal interests, in much the same way as it has been with the Web, but in that ever-so-enticing frogans way.

The nature of your frogans is likely to be determined not only by what you wish to express, but also by the technical hurdles that you choose to jump or avoid.

Regardless of your approach, you’ll always start at the same place: with the registration of a frogans address (ex: “frogans*myname”). Frogans can only be viewed using the Frogans Player, which opens a frogans only by its frogans address. In your frogans address settings, which you can modify at any time, you indicate the Internet location of your frogans root directory, which is where the files that make up your frogans are stored (ex”http://www.myhost.com/mydirectory/”).

The table below shows three levels of complexity for authoring frogans and hosting them on the Internet, where A represents the most basic, hands-on, most technically challenging approach, and C the most passive, worry-free method.

A For those who are comfortable with hand-coding, dealing with Internet hosting services, and who insist on having maximum creative leeway, they can author their frogans from scratch, using image processing software such as Photoshop or Gimp, and hand-coding their documents in the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL). They’ll upload their files themselves by FTP or SCP to their frogans root directory, at the Internet location that they’d indicated in their frogans address settings.

B With a little bit of patience these same people might wait for an offline WYSIWYG desktop FSDL authoring tool to show up. I know of one already that is under development, and I’d encourage all able developers to consider giving it a go (and to contact me for additional support if you’re interested). They’d still have to deal with uploading to their host’s server by FTP or SCP, but it’s not the trickiest part.

C With an online authoring service for creating frogans easily online, many hosting services could happily propose it to their clients. For instance, in their frogans address settings, the client indicates that their frogans root directory is on that host’s server. With all of the elements under one roof the hosting service can provide a user interface for authoring a frogans, as well as handling all the necessary file management. Even if the application didn’t offer all of the creative possibilities that one could have in hand-coding, it would sure be nice to author and publish a frogans straight from the web browser.

A service that will fall under this third category is under development at STG Interactive. The idea is to make it easy for anybody to publish a simple frogans right away while leaving the door open for them move on to other hosts and publishing methods if they like. Frogans will be created and customized from pre-existing templates. While the options will be limited (eg.: limits on the number of slides, links, images and themes), the results will be quick. And aside from the frogans address registration fee, the service and hosting will be free of charge.

Something that the social web is proving is that a great number of us have plenty of things to say, whether it’s about our interests, hobbies, work, schools, friends, or just about ourselves. And we’re continually open to finding a better medium for saying them. If it weren’t for that blasted learning curve!

In my Reach Out and * Somebody entry I emphasized a frogans can enjoy a certain permanence on your desktop. A frogans can be reduced to a very small size, allowing it to remain active and maintain a distinctive visual aspect without gobbling up too much desktop real estate. This might put a number of frogans in competition for your attention however, and sooner or later you might have to make that choice between whether you keep that pizza delivery menu frogans up there in the corner, or close it, but keep it in the favorites menu, or (GASP!) forget about it altogether, because there’s a new sub sandwich delivery in town, and they rock!

Since there’s only so much space available on your screen at any given moment, you have to prioritize. It’s at this point that you might start thinking that not only are you what you eat, but what you frogans also, because what you choose put in front of you will be of the subjects in the frogansphere you find to be the most important.

For activists of all flavors this could alter the landscape. It’s one thing to have people on your emailing list and visitors to your site, but having your frogans full-time on someone’s desktop is a different matter. It’s more like having your cause adopted. More than just some desktop icon, it can be navigated within itself, or to the Web. You give it depth with news, images, invitations, and links to everything pertinent on the net.

Imagine a frogans that looks like an AIDS awareness pin. Real-world AIDS awareness pins are worn by people to express to others their support for people inflicted with AIDS, and for the efforts to conquer it. It’s reasonable to suggest also that they serve as a way for these people to remind themselves of what’s most important for them. Having an AIDS awareness frogans on your display might be something like looking in a mirror. You choose to have it there because it’s a priority – it’s a priority because you choose to have it there. What’s more, it’s not just a pin, it’s a navigable site, a gateway to the latest news and resources, a way of keeping up with the community.

This George Monbiot piece on renewable energy that appeared in the Guardian touches upon the need to rally around a cause before any significant action will be taken. For some folks, maybe adopting a frogans will be their first step towards adopting a cause.

Take another look at Reach Out and * Somebody for some more ideas on how a frogans like this can work with its visitors.

This is my first day back from two weeks in the countryside, and since I’m easing my way back into city life and the issues surrounding Frogans technology, I’m going to ease into a pertinent frogans-related subject with a real-life example:

The city of Paris added a new wing, or wheel, to their public transportation service recently: municipal bicycles. This makes sense in a city like Paris where distances are short, destinations are plenty, and rush-hour traffic is an horreur.

The bikes are stationed at, well, at bike stations. Each bike is secured to a post by an electronically-controlled lock. It would take either a welding torch or the jaws of life to steal a bike, which would be hardly worth the bother given that each one is equipped with GPS, and that they’re far too ungainly to be considered a status symbol. Each station is equipped with a kiosk at which you make your transaction and choose a bike. Each kiosk has a display monitor and a numbered keypad, and that’s where the trouble begins.

For procuring a bike, the monitor is your user interface, and the keypad is your input device. Every option presented on the screen is accompanied by a numbered icon which bears a striking resemblance to its corresponding key on the keypad below. But instead of going to the keypad, aspiring bikers apparently prefer to touch the icon on the display. When nothing happens, many give up and take the Metro.

This almost happened to me before it dawned on me that the keypad below might have other functions than just taking my credit card’s PIN number. Getting past that I was free to struggle through an unintuitive maze of instructions that followed. This quickly attracted an audience of frustrated pedestrians, generally over 50, eager to see how I cracked the enigma. Indiana Jones and Temple of Vroom.

“Oh, you touch the keypad.” And there I go explaining in my awkward French all the little steps that only make sense to those too young to remember the rotary dial. I should have kept my mouth shut. This insane user interface is obviously a stealth public safety measure for keeping the old, and old-ish, away from these contraptions.

What’s this doing on a blog that’s supposed to be dedicated to Frogans technology? Let’s call it an example of what can unexpectedly happen (or not happen) in interactive design when working in a new medium. For every medium out there there’s a long implicit list of do’s and don’ts. When authoring a web site DO put a link to the home page on every page of the site. DON’T run an animated GIF under body text. Ignoring these things puts you at high risk of doing crummy work.

While we can expect to see a whole lot of great frogans by years end, some crummy ones are bound to crop up from time to time.

So hey kids, keep in mind that a frogans is not a website. There’s no “back” button unless you put one there. Keep your text short and concise, not like this blog, because the real estate on a frogans slide is precious. Not too many buttons, because you’ll need some no-button room for moving a frogans around on your screen. Frogans are intended to work alongside the Web, so there’s no need to go trying to replace it. And frogans are intended to be for everybody – it’s not like somebody’s going to take one and ride in front a bus.

Yes Petunia, there is a frogans address registration affiliation program. Even for people in Virginia.

It’s like this: STG Interactive develops the Frogans Player. STG Interactive lets people download and use the Frogans Player for free (without even asking for their email address).

STG Interactive writes the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL) and posts the specifications without obligation for whoever wants to use them for authoring frogans.

STG Interactive invests oodles and oodles in technology and servers for the Main Frogans Network to which millions of Frogans Players on the computers of millions of Internet users world-wide may connect simultaneously 24/7 for locating millions of frogans by their frogans addresses on the Internet – for free?

With one exception: A frogans on the Internet requires a frogans address in order for it to be accessible. And you have to pay when you register a frogans address. But it’s cheap. 12 bucks for a year’s registration (20 bucks for two) is cheap. This is STG Interactive’s sole source of revenue (no adware, no private information collecting). I’m not going to suggest what kind of numbers are on the line, but STG Interactive will have to register gobs and gobs and heaps and heaps of frogans addresses to keep the motor running.

This is where the fun begins. Every new frogans on the Internet is an additional reason to download and install the Frogans Player. Every additional person who has installed the Frogans Player on their computer, be it running Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, is one more reason to be publishing a frogans.

So if you’ve already registered a frogans address and have taken the time, effort and all-out passion to author a frogans worthy of the cause, you’re probably keen to the idea of your frogans having a lot of visitors. As your visitors in turn will want to get the most out of their shiny new Frogans Player, they will probably encourage more people to register frogans addresses who will in turn create more useful and entertaining frogans to be visited. This self-propagation of the Frogansphere (don’t look it up in Wikipedia, it’s a new word) results in there being more Frogans Player-enabled users ready to visit and navigate your frogans. May the circle be unbroken.

But at the time of this posting, the Frogansphere is tiny. In fact, it’s pre-natal, waiting for the upcoming Frogans technology release. But since we want our Frogansphere to grow up big and strong, it’s good to know that there is a frogans address affiliation program in the works to encourage the early nourishment and continued nutrition that it needs.

Here’s how it’s going to work: Once the program becomes operational you’ll be able to enroll into the frogans address registration affiliate program at the Commission Junction website (in the meantime, check out the Community page at frogans.com). There, you will be able to choose from a variety of text and banner ad links for frogans address registration that you put on your website, blog or emails. Every time someone registers a frogans address after following one of your links, not only does the Frogansphere get a little heftier and healthier, but you get a 10% commission. That comes out to $1.20 for a one-year registration, $2.00 for a two-year registration.

A couple zillion of those and the Frogansphere is off to college.

Note: Commission Junction should not be confused with “Conjunction Junction”, Bob Dorough’s Schoolhouse Rock boogie-woogie masterpiece.

I’m off to Brittany for a couple of weeks of sun and rain. This will be accompanied by a low pressure front on my end of the blogsphere, resulting in reduced output until I get back (around the 6th of August). Stay cool and dry.

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”.