The Frogans Player is an amazing piece of software, if only for it’s image-processing capabilities.

I come from a graphics background. I’ve been pushing pixels around for so long, it’s not even cool. A result of all this bloody experience is that I’ve now a lot of preconceptions about how images should be prepared and finalized before they can be considered “ready”. Ready for print, ready for multimedia, ready to go.

For instance, say I’m designing a web page. I’ll probably start out by getting creative with a pencil and paper, drawing the basic elements. Before long I’ll find myself in either Illustrator or Photoshop putting a more finalized look together. As I get further into the production, the less room I have to create spontaneously.

Now comes the glorious moment when I like what I see (and my client likes it too). At this point I think about how I’m going to slice it up into pieces which will be easily utilized in HTML. Imagine cutting into a decorated birthday cake. Creation is over, consumption begins.

This last week I’ve been helping out with the writing of the next major version of the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL), and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s meant looking closely at its basic principals, and it’s helped me realize that with FSDL you can extend the creative process further into the productive end when authoring frogans.

The Frogans Player is, in part, image manipulation software. That means that I can lighten, darken, rotate and flip, stretch and repeat, assign layers and masks to my images at the FSDL coding phase of my work. In effect, I can write into an FSDL source document commands for performing all sorts of image processing. These image processing tasks will be performed by the Frogans Player on the end-user’s computer when they navigates to that frogans.

This opens the door to new options in the creative process. Whereas before I would concentrate on having a maximum of visual resources handy to meet my varying production needs, I can now start thinking about minimizing my resources and getting the maximum effect out of them on the end-user’s side in real time. This also allows me more creative options, even when I’m far down the production line.

Say I want to put a roll-over effect on a button. With FSDL I’m not obliged to create a separate visual element for each button state. I can simply create one button image and with FSDL treat it differently depending on mouse behavior. For instance, I might change its opacity, hue, lightness, contrast, rotation, size, shadow presence and disposition, etc. when the mouse passes over it. This way, not only do I reduce the number and variety of image files associated with my frogans, but I now have fewer images to manage and update when I modify the structure and look of my frogans.

This is also good news for those who will create frogans using server applications because visual effects can be applied dynamically. For instance, let’s say that I wanted to make a frogans that highlighted the number of winter holiday fat burning days left before the first day of summer. On the appropriate slide I could generate a progress bar. In FSDL this progress bar could actually be a mask for a photo of a volleyball tournament in Malibu, a progress bar that extends to the right with each passing day, complete with a gradient overlay which turns from cold-blue to searing red. My only graphic resource here is the photo. The rest can be written in FSDL, manageable by a server application.

For the “casual” froganizer (Aunt Peg’s decorated birthday cake frogans – 101 unique designs), they know that they have a palette of options at their disposal even if their visual resources are limited. They can fit that picture into that frame, tweak the color, make that text fit just right… On second thought, don’t get me talking about text manipulation. Not today. That’s another (fascinating) subject, and you want to get on to the next entry.

frogans*wrestling
frogans*catnip
frogans*geek
frogans*rockstar
frogans*digital
frogans*cheapstuff
frogans*freestuff

It’s 2008 and 98% of the good ones have already been taken. How could this have happened? Where was I when the light turned green? If only I had listened. If only I had taken action when the time was ripe.

Ha ha, but it’s not 2008. Not yet. There’s still time.

A frogans address is the frogans equivalent of a domain name on the Web, except that it’s easier to say over the phone, since you never have to worry about whether there’s a string of “w”s in it or not.

What frogans addresses and Internet domain names have in common is that they’re registered on a first-come-first-served basis, meaning that the really good names are the first to get snatched-up.

When you register a frogans address at frogans.com you indicate the IP address where your frogans root directory (containing your frogans resource files) will be located. This information is stored on a Frogans Network System (FNS) server so that an end-user’s Frogans Player can find and go to your frogans.

As you can normally have any number of directories on a hosting server, you can have any number of frogans addresses on the same host.

You can reserve a frogans address whether or not you already have a web hosting account. You simply update your frogans address account settings at frogans.com once you know where your frogans root directory is going to be. By the same token, you can change the host for your frogans whenever you like. You need only update that information in your frogans address account settings.

You can transfer the rights to an address to whomever you want, and the terms of the deal are entirely between you and the recipient. That means that if you paid $12 for a year’s registration of “frogans*rent-a-car”, and then decided that you’re no longer interested in renting whatsoever, you’re at liberty to transfer that registered address, along with the rights to renew it, to the highest bidder.

The kick-off date frogans address registration has yet to be announced, but I’ll be kicking myself ’til 2020 if someone gets “frogans*joecady” before I do. Hey, don’t get any funny ideas!

Coffee? Club sandwich? A slice of Rosie’s homemade pecan pie?

Frogans? Well why didn’t you say so in the first place, Hon? They have their own section on the menu. It’s right here:

• What is a frogans?
  • Frogans basics
  • Why indeed…
• Who’s behind all this?
  • About STG Interactive
• Is making a frogans reserved for big development firms?
  • Frogans FSDL Publishing – part1
• What’s Frogans technology?
  • To put it quite simply…

“They were saying that cyberspace should be designed by architects. I told them that it’s already being designed: by developers!”
- some guy at a party in 1994

I had to agree at the time that people who were used to designing buildings, bridges and bathrooms were under-prepared to impose structure in what we, at the time, called cyberspace. It was like proposing that jumbo jets be piloted by tour-guides. Just wacko.

We don’t use the word cyberspace anymore, because there’s rarely anything spatial about it. Under the “page” model the Web is a series of flat surfaces, each crammed with zones of information, each zone begging for your attention, enticing you to click and to find yourself on another flat surface, much like the one that preceded it.

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten

Back in the days when we used words like “cyberspace”, we had certain expectations of what the information revolution would bring. Since were living in a three-dimensional world where the information amassed daily was in a real three-dimensional context (TV notwithstanding), we naturally imagined that cyberspace would work the same way. What we got instead was an environment that was amazingly rich in content, but only two dimensions deep. There are 1,133,408,294 Internet users world-wide* crawling around on their bellies like reptiles.
(*ref: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm June 18, 2007).

In the real world we humanize our surroundings. We furnish rooms, not only with essential items such as chairs, tables and lamps. We also decorate them with objects that remind us of who we are and what we hope to become. We put pictures on the walls of our friends and family, and are glad to see our friends and family doing likewise.

When I first heard about frogans, Alexis and Amaury kept talking about how frogans can provide a way to really open up Internet publishing to the masses, and I must admit, I didn’t quite get it. Since then the Social Web has emerged, and it’s beginning to sink in: Frogans allow for a human dimension for publishers as well as end-users that’s hard to imagine on the Web.

It’s almost too simple: A principal idea behind frogans is that they can exist on your desktop in harmony with other elements. You can even have several on display and still go on with whatever else you’re doing. Or, you can zoom-up one or more to look more closely, navigate to another slide on the same frogans, or to another frogans, all without being obliged to lose sight of my other activities. You can treat a frogans much in the same way you would the physical objects that you’ve chosen to have around you.

I can imagine having an individual frogans for everybody I know, or at least care about. (I can’t imagine having a MySpace page constantly open, much less several.) I’m looking forward to the day that everyone in my family has published a frogans containing at least a recent photo, perhaps a whole selection of them, and a slide featuring text that rounds up everything that they’d like to share at that moment with the people on the other end. And I’ll do the same.

Suddenly my desktop environment has a vertical dimension. There’s a real world element to the cyberworld. I can stop crawling around like a lizard and get back to my human ways.

(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.

Hey kids. Would you like to experiment? With frogans? I thought as much. That’s why I’ve put this little tutorial together. It’ll blow your mind.

Should I be getting paranoid about a frogans wiring my desktop to the Internet? In my last entry I talked about how a frogans can become a permanent window from your desktop to the Net, and how this can be a means by which Internet publishers can strengthen their ties with end-users. Is this not just another way for Big Brother to infringe on our privacy?

I’ve been talking about a frogans as a permanent desktop browsing tool, but I think I need to expand a little bit about what is meant by “browsing”.

Perhaps the moniker “browser” is misleading. Back in the old days when browsing applied only to physical activities that you do in bookstores, record stores, libraries, and mail-order catalogues, you never had to consider the idea that an invisible entity was browsing back at you. Okay, there’s the occasional clerk eyeing the customers, watching to see if that Hot Tuna LP is going to move, or if that kid’s paid for everything that’s in his backpack. But at least that clerk was a person with whom you could make eye contact.

Today it’s a different scene. Instead of walking in into a building, or a room, to feed our eyes, ears, stomachs and brains, we exchange digits through an enticing mysterious black box. The vast majority know little of how the thing works by itself, and even less of how it interacts with that maze of bigger boxes on the other end of the line. Yet we light the thing up, make it an integral part of our lives, fill it up with all sorts of personal, professional and financial information, and then go and use it to browse through other black boxes that are not fundamentally different from our own.

Talk about blind trust. It sounds like leaving your entire wallet at the door as a right of passage.

Alright, not completely so. That’s because the perceived risk of becoming a victim of fraud or the invasion of privacy has been, up until now, acceptable to most people. But who’s to say if the perception, or reality, of these risks will be kept in check? And for how long?

Can you trust that frogans, that window-less window, wide-open day and night – can you trust it to keep the mosquitos, burglers and peeping toms at bay and out of your hair? The reality is that trust can never be imposed. It can only be earned. The ultimate profusion of Frogans technology will depend on its reputation for assuring the end-user’s security and privacy.

One-way window, mirrored sunglasses, and all that

Frogans technology implements security measures that, until now, have been unheard of in Internet navigation.

While a frogans is the navigational interface that you see on your screen, it is the Frogans Player that displays it and manages its connection to the Internet. Unlike a desktop widget, for example, a frogans is not an application, but rather an interactive rendering of images and content written in FSDL that the Frogans Player has located on the Internet and displays on your screen. Frogans Technology architecture assures that it is only the Frogans Player that will ever be capable of doing this, guaranteeing that a frogans, regardless of its author, will always carry with it the privacy and security measures provided by the Frogans Player.

For instance:

• The Frogans Player will never allow any content from a frogans to be written to the end-user’s hard drive. This is a huge step away from the conventions accepted for web browsers. Frogans content is loaded only into active memory, protecting the end-user from any possible corrupted or malicious content (should it get past the parsing process, which is highly improbable).
• The Frogans Player will never transmit information concerning the end-user, be it their operating system, system fonts, applications installed, or other content. The Frogans Player may transmit session information concerning a frogans to a server, but this information is temporary and completely anonymous with respect to the end-user.

All that is to say that a frogans, if it is intended to be a window overlooking the Internet, is a one-way window. It’s part of the deal. If there are any other Internet technologies out there that can assure the same level of consideration the end-user, I hope that someone will say so by hitting me with some comments.

Why indeed… continued

A particular challenge for Frogans technology is in getting end-users to establish one or several frogans as permanent or semi-permanent elements on their desktops. That’s my challenge as a frogans blogger/evangelist. But it’s also a new challenge for anybody who uses the Internet to reinforce their contact with their public.

Eight-stringed example

Let’s say I’m organizing events for my mandolin orchestra… Don’t laugh! I used to play in one. Anyway, between the rehearsals, recording and constant touring, I’m having a heck of a time keeping the mandolinists, mandolists, mandocellists and bass mandolinists informed about what’s going on. So I publish a frogans at my new frogans address “frogans*bigbadmandolin.schedule” and make it really cool-looking, like a Gibson F-9. I throw in a little PHP so that it requires a password. That way only my orchestra members have access to it.

It looks like their favorite instrument, so they’re more than happy to shrink it to button-size and make it a permanent part of their desktop environment. (It has no access to their system resources, so there’s no paranoia factor.) And I’ve set it up so that if I’ve made a change in the schedule, or if I have an important announcement, an exclamation point will show up on it. That way, the members of my orchestra know to zoom-up my frogans and see what I have to say. Maybe that will mean browsing for more information on the frogans, or hopping on to the orchestra’s website, or even getting back to me by email.

Going global

Now let’s say that the mandolin orchestra starts arousing an international fan base. I publish a freely accessible frogans and make it look like of the logo of everybody’s favorite mandolin orchestra. The fans will be more than happy to have it permanently hang out on their desktops. I chock this frogans full of breaking news, as well as the latest gossip from the mandolin orchestra circuit. I even throw in useful links, and some of which are paid, helping to finance the project. I’m now reaching a select worldwide audience in the blink of an eye, and I’ve only just started thinking about getting a fan-club database going.

The key element here is that the frogans has become a permanent element on the end-users’ desktops. I’m not saying that for a frogans to be effective it has to always be open, but it is its potential to be active and visible and wired, without interfering with all the other activities that computers were built to do, that allows a frogans to be an open window rather than an enclosed corridor to the Internet.

Now let’s say that I want to share my thoughts, photos, favorite links with a select set of friends.

Now let’s say I want to valorise my Web site. A frogans can be an awesome nav-bar.

Now let’s say that my product has cult status potential and a really cool logo.

Now let’s say that someone else continue this list…

It started with a play on a word invented at STG Interactive by Laura Whiteman, which is froganize. According to froganslore (a word that I just now invented for the purpose of getting through this paragraph), you can froganize your Web site by integrating it with one or many frogans. For instance, you might include a link to a frogans on your page, or inversely, link from a frogans to your site. Anyway, as catchy a word as froganize is, froganeyes seemed to say much the same thing, but with an added visual aspect.

Before long I tumbled on this photo by Jan Pietruszka on iStockphoto of this Agalychnis callidryas (or Red-eyed Tree Frog) sat atop a halved kiwi, which I integrated into the head area of this blog site. As it turns out, the Red-eyed Tree Frog, if we are to trust what’s said about it in Wikipedia, lends itself to comparisons with frogans.

For instance, the Red-eyed Tree Frog is native to the rainforests of Costa Rica and Central America, and stays near the water so that it can reproduce. Frogans technology was conceived in France, but makes its habitat on the Internet, and a frogans will reproduce anywhere where there’s an Internet connection.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog is nocturnal. Frogans are 24/7.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog relies heavily on it vision. A frogans is visual, and if you want to make a frogans, it’s always a good idea to do it with vision.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog is also visual. As a tadpole it can change color like a chameleon. As an adult it closes its big red eyes and covers up the blue regions on its sides when it wants to blend in with the green foliage and hide from a predator. Then, if it senses that it’s under attack, it might open its eyes and show its full color range to throw its attacker off guard while it hops to safety. A frogans can catch your eye with its capacity to have different visual aspects, including its shape and colors, but can also blend in with your desktop environment thanks to its zooming ability.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog can pull its big red eyes through the roof of its mouth to help push down food… Okay, okay, we’d all like to see a frogans do that, wouldn’t we?