I was at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas recently. I got the impression that the wireless industry could well use an explosion in mobile content creation to come along. It hasn’t happened yet, and here are three reasons why:

1) The mobile Web. People are not crashing the gates to redo their existing websites, or create new ones, in mobile-friendly WAP format. Maybe it’s because of the unpredictability of WAP’s display on different platforms and devices. Maybe it’s because they are waiting for easier and more universal standards to come along. Maybe it’s because WAP just seems so 90s.

2) Mobile apps. Imagine that instead of just authoring content into Web pages, every site was in its own custom browser which you installed on your computer. That’s a bit the logic behind mobile apps, and this is justified when rich content, like games and video, is concerned. But there is a hefty price tag for their initial development, for porting them to different devices and for updating them regularly. Plus the store-based distribution model (find-it, download-it, install-it) is very restrictive. All this means that this will never be an online publishing option for the vast majority of us.

3) Frogans technology is not yet launched. Frogans technology will basically fill that enormous gap between the mobile Web and mobile apps. This will be the only format which simply allows you to author once and have the same online content display securely and identically on all supported devices. Plus, it’s a format that is perfectly adapted for touchscreen phones. Frogans sites are looked-up for navigation via their frogans addresses, so once your Frogans Player is installed, the (exploding number of) frogans sites of the Universe will be at your fingertips.

What’s really funny is that these same frogans sites will also be navigated on desktop computers using the same technology. That’s really funny.

Frogans has been leading a double life. I’ve been itching to come clean for weeks, but didn’t quite know how to put it. Here goes: It’s not just for the desktop anymore!

That’s right. Frogans has always been intended to also work on mobile phones and other tiny-screened devices. For crying out loud, isn’t it obvious? With a 320 by 240 pixel maximum display size, you can’t say that the writing wasn’t on the wall!

That’s not to say that I haven’t been sincere about how cool frogans mini-sites will be on the desktop. It’s still as true as ever. No other format for online content goes so far for enabling harmony between browsing and other applications. The resulting visual and interactive persistence with frogans mini-sites is unprecedented. And don’t forget the benefits for security and end-user privacy.

And then there’s mobile. Even though frogans for desktop devices (running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) has the lead on the roadmap, getting frogans on mobile has always been a key objective.

Mobile phone and PDA technology is now at a point where these devices can do a lot of the browsing that used to be reserved for personal computers only. Even so, the Web is largely a hostile place for these little devices. Content has to either be specifically authored for them (e.g. WAP) or some kind of adaptation has to take place – proxy server rendering (skyfire), content adaptation, zoomable pages (iPhone, Opera Mini). Plus, unless you’re using WiFi, it’s often SLOW.

Frogans mini-sites, on the other hand, will be equally friendly to both desktop and mobile devices. There will be no need for authors to adapt their content for one platform or the other. They’re cool in both worlds.

The very same principals for making Frogans technology universal for the desktop – secure, standard, lightweight content, easy on device resources – make it ideal for mobile. This is nothing new. Check out this post from last year.

At the end of the day, the frogans mini-site format is simply universal. Although frogans mini-sites will first be seen on desktop devices, the same mini-sites can be visited from mobile devices as the Frogans Player versions for those devices become available. Think of it as a way of jumping ahead of the mobile Web game, or as leaping across the desktop-mobile divide.

Whatever the frogans you make or browse, it’s always going to be a frogans. You can be sure of that because Frogans technology development has always been guided by a set of fundamental principals, self-imposed by STG Interactive. The aim of these principals is to help assure a high level of user-friendliness and usability in a frogans, whatever the frogans that frogans may be.

In a sense, Frogans technology is open on one end, and closed on the other. It’s open with respect to the use of FSDL. Under the FSDL perpetual license it will always be free to use for creating frogans, and even for creating frogans authoring tools. If a software company decides to create the equivalent of Dreamweaver for frogans, that’s fine. There’s no obligation to STG Interactive.

On the other hand, if someone wants to make an alternative to the Frogans Player – say one that accepts larger images, or can detect the date and time on your system – forget it. Why? Because frogans don’t do that.

I can’t say it enough: Frogans are not widgets. I should add: Widgets are not frogans. Oh no. They should be so lucky.

Here’s a short list of annoying things that will tell you that something is not a frogans:

• If it doesn’t have a frogans address, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it opens up without you intending it to, then it’s not a frogans.
• If you can’t rescale it immediately to the size you like, or hide it, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it slows down the performance of your computer, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it doesn’t function and display identically regardless of your operating system, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it animates without your input, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it passes behind another application, or application window, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it downloads to your hard disk, then it’s not a frogans.

And here’s a list of things that will annoy your computer that a frogans won’t do:

• If it opens up an application unexpectedly, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it contains HTML, JavaScript or Flash, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it interferes with the functioning of other applications, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it depends on the functioning of software other than the Frogans Player, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it puts a wiggle in your walk, then it could be frogans, or it could be what you had with your cereal this morning.

Frogans do not use cookies per se. For storing a frogans’ session information after a frogans has been closed it may be written to an end-user’s system drive as a “session identifier”.

You can think of a session identifier as kind of a smart cookie. By default, a frogans’ session identifier disappears when that frogans is closed. However, if the end-user adds a frogans to their “frogans favorites”, sort of like a list of frogans bookmarks, its session identifier may remain persistent, available on disk for that frogans to consult the next time it is opened. (When you add a frogans to your frogans favorites, a dialog box appears informing you that in doing so, you enable session identifiers to be written to your local drive).

For example, the frogans that you’re browsing contains a chess game which you’re playing against a server app. Each time you make a move the slide refreshes, sending to the server a session identifier describing the state of the game so that the server can compose the chessboard accordingly on the refreshed slide.

It’s 3am and you have to shut down the computer before the game ends. A good night’s sleep will help you rethink your strategy anyway. If this frogans is not designated as a “favorite” the state of your game will vaporize the moment you close it.

Fortunately, you had already added it to your frogans favorites. At 5am, when you open it up again, it has the same size and placement on your screen as it did at 3am, plus it displays the last slide you were visiting before you closed it.

And what’s more, it will remember the state of your chess game, thanks to its session identifier.

“Frogans favorites” is more than just a list of bookmarked frogans addresses. By default a frogans always opens to its homeslide, at full-size, in the middle of the screen. Adding a frogans to your frogans favorites 1) puts that frogans in your frogans favorites submenu for easy access, 2) sets your Frogans Player to remember the slide, the placement on your screen and the size of that frogans from when it was last viewed and 3) allows the last session identifier to remain on your disk, like a persistent cookie.

The Frogans Player’s default manner for opening frogans helps assure that frogans be accessible without being imposing. Keep in mind that, when opened, frogans are loaded into active memory only. So there is no need to cache frogans resource files on the end-user’s local drive. This helps keep your system insulated from potentially malicious documents, and besides, why clutter up your hard drive with unnecessary files?

With the end-user choosing to list a frogans in their frogans favorites, it puts power to decide if session data is written back into their own hands.