What is it?
Plug-ins are separate software programs that work either alone
on your desktop or to extend your browser, usually for multimedia. The fun
stuff.
Skills
downloading
free or almost free resources on the web
installing
them to extend the browser's capability for playing video, animations, and
music, for displaying richly formatted text, for metasearching, etc.
Tools
Windows Media Player, Real Player,
Apple's QuickTime, Macromedia's Shockwave, Adobe's Acrobat, Copernic,
Bookmarklets, Microsoft's Web accessories
ThePluginSite.com's how
to install plugins in 24 different applications
Audio-visual
Audio-visual, sometimes abbreviated AV. That word from the
analog world doesn't quite do justice to what's going in the new digital world.
You'll find competing formats (ah, the glories of capitalism) so you'll probably
need all of these players.
Windows Media Player comes with your computer in the Start |
Programs | Accessories | Entertainment menu. It will play .mpg and .mpeg files
and it may play .avi video files and .mp3 audio files depending on the codecs
you have loaded.
If it has trouble with those two formats, I recommend Apple's Quicktime 4
player for .avi files.
Go to MP3.com for a player for
.mp3 audio files. I recommend WinAmp.
If you run across .rm and .ram video and audio files, then you
need Real's RealPlayer
8 Basic.
Macromedia makes great software for visual artists. You won't go
far at all in the dot-com world without needing their Shockwave 8 and Flash 4
players.
Shockwave Player displays high-performance multi-user games,
interactive product simulations, online entertainment, and training
applications. Flash Player, included with any download of the Shockwave Player,
displays ads and short animations with some interactivity. On some websites,
they are both referred to as "Flash". The file format, .swf, stands
for Shockwave Flash.
They should come with your browser downloads. If you need them,
however, you'll find out the first time you try to view a page that requires
them. Do it.
To get started with Shockwave, check out Balthaser's site. It'll take a couple of
minutes for the plug-in to download, but you're in for a visual treat.
How Web
Animation Works
by Tom Harris
Text
Visual designers from the print world were reluctant to move
onto the Web because bits don't stay still like the atoms they grew up with.
They aren't comfortable with "pages" that have things appearing and
disappearing and that can be resized and rearranged by the person reading it.
The other group that is having trouble with dynamic "pages" is
lawyers. They're used to information fixed in property where it can be in only
one place at a time and can thus be owned, transferred, and signed.
Adobe has catered to these markets, building bridges between the
world of atoms and the world of bits. They have a set of tools called Acrobat
that make bits behave like atoms. As are many of their products, Acrobat files
are designed to be printed. The proprietary file format uses the extension .pdf
for Portable Document Format. If you don't have Acrobat Reader on
your machine, you will be prompted to get it the first time you request a .pdf
file online.
Searching
At one time, I used Copernic
almost every day. It's a meta-search engine that resides on your computer rather
than a web site. As a result, it has lots of features and services that would be
take too much bandwidth over the Web. I recommend it highly.
I have recently found Google to return better results than the
free version of Copernic. After Google gives me Copernic's ability to save and
manage the results pages, I'll probably abandon Copernic entirely.
Others
The Plugin Site
WindowsMedia.com
UCmore
Cuts through web clutter, simplifies surfing, and saves you
tons of time! As you move from site to site, UCmore displays related information
right in your browser. It's never been easier to "Cmore" of
what you're looking for!
Browser Plug-Ins
