Using Frogans Player for Developers – alpha release

This post talks about how to download Frogans Player (alpha version) for viewing and testing Frogans sites on your local computer.

  1. What is Frogans Player?

    To view any Frogans Site, you must open it in Frogans Player.

    Frogans Player is the free end-user software for viewing and browsing Frogans sites. The fully-functional version will look up Frogans sites on the Internet and display them on desktop and mobile devices (Windows, Mac, Linux / iOS, Android).

    An alpha version of Frogans Player for developers is currently available for Windows and Mac computers. This software will allow you to view Frogans sites that are stored locally on your computer.

  2. Download Frogans Player for Develpers – alpha

    A regularly-updated version of the Frogans Player alpha is available at http://get.frogans. Click on the name of your platform (Windows or Mac OS X) to get to the appropriate download page.

    The Download link is near the bottom of the page, but the rest of the page is worth reading, too. I recommend following the link to the FSDL 3.0 page which will show you the latest, regularly-updated documentation for the Frogans Slide Description Language.

  3. Unzipping Frogans Player

    The Frogans Player download file is compressed in the 7-Zip format. This makes for a quicker download, but you might not have the right unzipping software on your computer.

    Windows users: A link to the free 7-Zp software is provided on the download page, or you can just click here.

    Mac users: 7-Zip provides a link to an unofficial Mac OS X package (7zX) for unzipping files.

    Attention Mac users: Gatekeeper is a Mac security feature that prevents unauthorized apps from opening on your computer. Depending on your settings, this might prevent your unzipping software and Frogans Player from running on your Mac! If this happens, just go to Apple menu > System Preferences… > Security & Privacy > General tab. There will be a button that will authorize the last application that Gatekeeper blocked.

  4. Run Frogans Player

    You don’t have to install Frogans Player. It will run from from any folder on your hard drive. Just double-click on the icon.

  5. Frogans Player has a very different user interface.

    Instead opening a window with a menu at the top, Frogans Player just puts a little yellow ball with the Frogans Player logo in the middle of your screen. You can move this ball to any part of your screen.

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    To get to the menu items, right-click on the ball (Ctrl-click for Mac users that have only a single-button mouse).

  6. View the sample Frogans site!

    The Frogans Player download comes with a sample site. To see it, go to the top menu item “Open a Frogans site.”

    A window will pop up with a text field where you are supposed to write a Frogans address.

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    This alpha version of Frogans Player will only look up Frogans sites stored locally in the “test” folder of the Frogans Player folder. To open the sample site, type “test*helloworld.”

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    The sample site is made up of two slides (“slides” are like pages in a Web site). Each slide has a button for navigating from one slide to the other.

  7. Create a Frogans site of your own and view it in Frogans Player

    If you want to try your hand at FSDL 3.0, you can use the Frogans Player alpha to view it (we’ll go through how to create sites elsewhere on this site).

    To view a Frogans site, put its FSDL documents and image resources together in a folder and put that folder in the “test” folder, found in the same directory as Frogans Player. In the “Open a Frogans site” text field type “test*” and the name of your folder (ex: “test*mySite”).

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