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’ll be a lot happier when the Frogans Player is out, because then I’ll have an easier time talking about the key perks when browsing with a frogans.

The user experience aspects take the top slots on the perk list. After all, that’s what’s going to make or break the implantation of the technology; to convince Internet creators, developers and publishers to trust the platform with their content, create frogans, put them online, and finally get people to check them out. The principal focus in Frogans technology development has always been (according to Alexis and Amaury – and I tend to believe them) on what works for the end-user.

People scour the Internet for content, but often pay a certain price when they receive it: a cluttered desktop, for instance, is one of those things that we’ve come to live with. You’ve got this, that, and the other thing hogging your screen space, right up to the point that you’re no longer sure which page is open, and which isn’t. You ask yourself where that second and third window or tab came from, and why you simply don’t have what you want there in front of you.

It zooms up and down in real time

Frogans give the end-user new options for viewing on-line content. You might have read the entry I wrote on widgets (and other mini-apps), and how, at first glance, frogans can resemble widgets: relatively small, differently-shaped windowless objects floating on your screen. The real differences between frogans and widgets, in fact, outweigh their similarities.

The first thing that an end-user is likely to notice is that their frogans is never covered up by a window. So you say, “Yikes! It may be small, but it’s in front of MySpace!”

Relax. Take a breath. Click on the edge of your frogans and drag. It zooms up and down in real time. When you zoom down (click on the edge and drag towards the center) the whole thing shrinks – images, buttons, type and all. Since there’s no window around it, it can get really small. At its smallest size (depending on how it’s authored) it might take on a more simplified appearance. At any rate, it’s now no bigger than your typical desktop icon, only it’s still on the top layer of your interface.

Now you can tuck it away somewhere, an edge, a corner of your screen. You can get back to it without the usual mental shuffling; you know: “Spreadsheet -> Web -> Spreadsheet -> Web -> Media Player… where was I?”

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.

As a response to a frequent first reaction from people when they first hear about frogans, I wrote a little something on frogans/widgets comparisons.

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.