Viewing on Any Device (
length: 7 PLP)
General
Whatever devices you use to surf Frangles Mobile, keep a few things abs-hard clear:
1-- FM has a full spectrum of page lengths. Some pages are a paragraph or quick blurb; others are chapter- length passages. Be prepared for any link to bring up a long page of text. If you can download standard internet images or have a device that can load portions of a page at a time, you're good to go, but don't expect a ton of two-line tweets. Treat Frangles Mobile like a favorite paperback book you can pick up wherever there's a PC, Mac, Pac, notebook, netbook, nook, noogle, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iPong, droid, android, linuxdroid, mechadroid, or blackberry and a bearable WhyFree signal.
2-- Frangles "Mobile" (we're considering other names) is the core, primary, basic way of reading Frangles.
(Think of "mobile" in the sense that Frangles itself is mobile, not the viewing device.) Frangles is essentially a large series of novels, ones you might otherwise purchase at the bookstore with no supplentary articles, blurbs, philosophy, artwork, or holograms. Just text! Looking at pretty pictures is a dainty plus, but it can also detract from the thought and work that went into the actual writing. (From some frangles, Frangles is a timeless masterpiece critiqued in college classrooms!) So focus on the prose before the pudding.
3-- Electronic displays
simulate real life reading pages. They may always be harsher on your eyes. Use care when reading for longer periods, especially if staring into a lit screen. (See eye tips elsewhere.)
4-- Some bricks (scenes) are longer than others! (We have this down to a vice.) Each brick (each individual webpage) can vary in length from a printed paperback page to a long chapter of a novel. Check your scroll bar when you start a new brick. If you hate picking up a book after forgetting to stick a bookmark where you left off last, don't start a long brick if you won't have time to finish it. (We've divided the extra long bricks into sub sections so you have a place to stop and re-start. These sub-brick divisions are not re-arrangable modules that fit into the official brick structure; they are just bookmarks for you to resume where you left off on the longer bricks.
5-- Frangles is an immortal evolving
draft, subjecting to the same editing, revision, rewriting, and restructuring as any other unfinished work, except Frangles is a radically
large draft over a radically long period of time. This means that over the course of months and years, things are subject to change. Be ready to come back and see things a little -- occasionally much -- changed, restructured, etc. The worst case of this is when we re-arrange the numbering system for a page or group of pages, although we do this carefully or sparingly with officially numbered bricks (as Frangles is dizzying enough set in stone without worrying about bricks floating around your room violating gravity). The most important thing to remember if you ever return to find something restructured, is that the structure and nature of Frangles mimics that of fractals. There's always something the same and always something different about one area of a fractal versus another, and if you ever have stuff mixed up on you in a different order here and find yourself reading pages you've read over again, the best way to think of this is that you're reading the same story over
from a different frangle, and if you can't find the precise one you were reading before and are frustrated you won't experience that exact ending (you probably read ahead anyway), don't worry, because going through the same ordeal the second time will only be half the frustranesia vu.
Specific Devices (we'll add more)
Desktop/PC
A desktop PC with a large screen is the best place to take advantage of both the .com and .mobi formats, just like you would use Notepad in Windows for simple text editing, and Word or Excel for involved documents. While the .mobi site may seem itsy-bitsy viewed on a modern browser juxtaposed a full 2080pi website with flash videos just a click or two away, it's just a couple keystrokes to enlarge the text, or a click or two to resize the window. In many/most browsers, you can hit Ctrl-PLUS to increase text and/or page size (depending on the browser and your options), and Ctrl-MINUS to lower them. Usually this will allow the text to wrap around the window, then you can de-maximize your browser and treat it as a running copy of Notepad! Now, you have a literally "mobile" Frangles window, very movable and adaptable to any situation. (We consider perhaps the most useful application for this to be the lessening of eye strain due to long exposure to a light source, via viewing a small window on a dark background such as a desktop background set to plain black.) Having a small "frowser" (frangles browser) is a great tool for reading Frangles in general, and an invaluable one if you're getting more into its structure, writing, and complexities (for instance, having several or many frowsers open at a time; as friters, this method is a basic necessity).
Mobile Phone
Pfah, what benefit could Frangles Mobile possibly have on a mobile phone. Doesn't make any sense to *me*, Orbo. Do I really have to write this paragraph? It's kind of rhetorical. I'm so tired I can't even think of a good visual metaphor to relate my tirednes to to contrive some vague narration of where the hell we are right now. Not that anyone could really be listening, unless you actually forgot to reset the... Orbo? Orbo, tell me you didn't already plug in the help page autodictation transfr%$ \]$#\@ ^NO_CARRIER
nook & e-ink readers
E-ink [Orbo am I spelling this right? Skip scratched off my xnet access] is a technology akin to frillions of tiny nano bot orbs constantly floating around and organizing themselves into grids of pixels akin to those of the new e-ink devices that do essentially the same thing except non-metaphorically. Unlike any other device, the nook and electronic book readers are speciifically designed for reading prose for long periods of time. The screen isn't lit; it's almost like looking at a standard sheet of paper. We haven't tried other readers, but we can say we're extremely impressed with the nook's ability to interpret a webpage and arrange it for standard reading. Obviously this works well in harmony with webpages that are already themselves geered towards prose-style reading, so the nook is probably our top pick for Frangles reading sans further testing of it (e.g. long-term exposure to see what kind of eyestrain issues the technology might retain or present). From what we can tell (or remember from trying it in the store), the nook takes the first or left most column of text on a webpage and wraps it neatly for reading as if it was printed right onto a page of a book, regardless of the table's width or dimensions. When we first tried looking at Frangles on it, it looked like the text had been specifically formatted to display perfectly on the device. Hence, if you own a nook, you should have no problem reading Frangles easily with the .com or .mobi site with a bit of experimentation.
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One big tip we can give you for the nook is that scrolling up and down a long page can be relatively easy with experimentation. The nook's touchpad doesn't scroll up and down at the same rate you move your finger in the way a standard default desktop mouse does. It massively takes the speed and perhaps even the acceleration of your finger's movement into account along with how much of the pad you touched or covered. You can get a lot more scroll speed on a long page of text by accelerating quickly and keeping a constant speed than scrolling in short repeated spurts. (Think of a paper towel dispenser by a public sink that you pump the lever of. You might pump it two or three times if you want such and such amount of paper; but if a 30-page glossary was printed on it, you'd want to get through it faster, so you'd pump it out at a regular rate to get to the term you want; this is what you have to do with our index of terms if you view it on one webpage!)
"iPong" (= iPhone + iPod + iPad)
The nice thing about modern iPongs are their ease of use and ability to interpret and adapt large webpages for view on smaller devices. Of course, this improvisation is limited and isn't geered toward any particular website or purpose. We tested an iPong and loved how it enlarged a table (column) of text to fit the screen when you double tapped it (great for our .com prose). It also displayed the simpler frangles mobile pages just fine at the default sized text too. The one problem we had was we couldn't see a way to adjust the actual size of the text, only zoom in and out with preset width, which caused the prose to scroll off screen (such that you'd have to scroll right and left for every horizontal if you wanted a smaller or larger font). We didn't test all the iPong models, but we feel there's one general thing to keep in mind when reading Frangles via an iPong: iPongs are in an especially gray limbo between the purposes of the .com and .mobi sites. If you use an iPong to read Frangles, keep a close comparison of the .com and .mobi sites and which one works best for you and your particular iPong browser.
Netbook
A small, portable widescreen monitor is a perfect size for reading books when perpindicular to the ground. While Frangles can read well on a netbook sitting normally, if your screen allows for rotation (if you don't know, it likely does), don't be afraid to rotate your netbook upward or downward so that your keyboard is facing toward the ceiling and the screen is vertical like a sheet of paper or book page. You can then hold it right on your lap and read it like a hardcover novel (note that the vents are exposed to the air this way; in normal position, you should use more caution about putting your netbook on a soft surface and potentially blocking the vents). The basic unformatted html pages of frangles mobile should work perfectly, wrapping the text to your screen when using a fullscreen web browser. When adjusting text size, use a web browser that resizes (or one that has the option of resizing) text so that it wraps to the window rather than assumes a fixed width and pushes some of the text off screen when you enlarge it. Although, if you want to read very small print, you may want to do the opposite. If you don't have access to a browser with an option to resize in the latter way, simply unmaximize your browser and adjust it to whatever width you want. If reading on a netbook in its standard position (keyboard flat on table or desk), you may want to unmaximize your browser and halve its width if you find your screen a little too wide for darting your eyes back and forth. If you read a lot on your netbook or read in bright light or sunlight often, get a screen which cuts down on glare as much as possible, or purchase a glare screen filter to help. Also,consider an unlit PixelQi screen (or any others like it).
Notebook / Laptop
Average the Desktop/PC and Netbook tips and you'll do fine. (One extra thing to keep mind that it's extra difficult on your eyes to be staring closely at a light source for an extended period of time; try not to place your laptop directly in front of your face if you can avoid it).
Droid
Follow our general viewing advicing, but keep one extra thing in mind while you free frangles (that is, use or experience Frangles) from a Droid or other device of any size that allows outside developers to develop software: the future of Frangles will be specific applications and software designed to make reading and organizing (and editing, from a friter's end) even more practical and fun than a pile of hologramless text files. When you free frangles mobile on a Droid -- or even use it while you're still dizzy from freeing Frangles -- let your imagination go wild with all the ways you might have been reading if we were better programmers (and will be, when we are). When you look at a simple 7 x 7 square of brick links, think, how might these be better organized if this was multi-million dollar software? When you download any new application, think to yourself, what would this application be like if the programmers were obsessed nonlinear prose fans with a masochistic fetish for career and marketing suicide? When you navigate with a map, ask yourself, where would I be going if I lived on planet Frangles rather than planet Earth? These brain exercises will involve you some of the core ideas of Frangles, and will help prep you for the future [failure] of our plans for global nonlinear franchise domination.