Advancements are creeping up everywhere. Especially on the internet. Not that long ago, many people were amazed at the Netscape Extensions. Now with Plug Ins, more Extensions, and many browsers following Netscapes lead, the internet is holding more promise for flexibility in design. Animation is easily possible, as well as using multimedia authoring packages to create internet content. It's a technology trend that is sweeping the country faster than the gossip column in a hair salon on Saturday. This page will attempt to keep you up to date on the latest and greatest in the world wide web.

ANIMATION	Many new tools are available for making images move on your web screen. Animated GIF images: Currently this image format seems widely supported. What it actually does is takes a series of GIF images and lays them overtop of each other and plays them with a delay between them to give the appearance of movement. (see the spinning logo in the upper left corner) Shockwave: This format requires a plug in to Netscape Navigtor or Internet Explorer from Microsoft. What Shockwave does is takes a Macromedia Director Movie and compresses it for internet playback. See our portfolio section for examples. QuickTime: This has been a standard in the computer video industry. Apple has transitioned this to the web to allow you to display video in the web browser.
IMAGE FORMATS	Shockwave for Freehand: This new format allows you to place a vector graphic in your web browser. You can specify "hot" areas in the images and the image is scalable. Clean, Crisp, and Colorful.
FRAMES	What can be said about frames except, Thank you Netscape. Frames allow you to separate the page into usable chunks of information. This page is "framed". The header at the top allows a menu to always be visible at all times... even when you leave this page.
DOCUMENTS	Many Plug Ins are cropping up to allow you to view document formats directly on your web browser. Which I initially felt this was odd, since that was what the web was originally for. However, these formats allow a document to look WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) to there application created format and not a HTML representation of it. Adobe Acrobat is the leader in this arena. Their PDF format is widely accept as the norm, and now they have made the transition to the internet. It's still in it's infancy but it definitely has a place in the world.
AUDIO	Audio on the internet has been almost as troublesome as sending video across the line. There are a few people putting out formats that are starting to handle this nicely. RealAudio: They have created a format that compresses audio to sending it across the internet at a reasonable speed. The sound is a little "tinny" but you can transfer that almost as fast as a page full of text. Shockwave: Thanks to the fine folks at Macromedia, they have added a streamable audio format that allows audio files (as opposed to audiophiles) to be sent across the net almost instantaneously. And these guys have taken it a little farther than RealAudio because this audio is combined with a shockwave movie... which will most likely contain synchronous animation as well.
JAVASCRIPT	This advancement gets a little tricky. JavaScript allows you to include Scripts into your HTML document. These scripts can allow your browser to be a little more "application-like". You can set it to pop up menu when an object is clicked. Savvy JavaScripters have learned how to retrieve your email address once entering your page, which has raised security questions as of late. The threat seems very minimal. The most damage it can currently do is function as a Caller-ID type system. but as it developes more this feature seems like it can only get better.
	We have added a page of links to these various items to download plug ins or to see how we have implemented these new tools for our customers.