June 1997
Web Graphics
Optimizing Animated GIFs
By Andrew B. King
Andy thinks he's crunched his GIF animations down to the smallest size possible, given today's tools. We invite you to take the Penguin challenge to see if you can do better.
Dynamic Biorythm Graphs
By Andrew Davison
While serving up static graphics is straightforward, generating them dynamically based on user input requires ingenuity. Andrew shows how you can create graphs and plots, and then convert them to GIF images on the fly.
Web-Site Usability Engineering, Part 2
By Paul Helinski
Paul continues his discussion of usability and computer-interface design, this month showing how you can test for usability and avoid common pitfalls.
C O L U M N S :
Webmaster's Domain
Although JavaScript lacks many valuable programming features, it's ideal for creating quick and dirty programs that add value to your Web site. Lincoln D. Stein reaches into his bag of cheap tricks and shares a few favorites.
Visual Designer
Borrowing a page from CD-ROM developers, many Web designers are using rollovers to present buttons that have an innovative design, yet retain their intuitive meaning. In her debut column, Lynda Weinman shares her design philosophies before showing how to implement rollovers.
Doing Justice to the Web
Obtaining multimedia content from third-party sources often involves copyright, trademark, personal-privacy, and publicity issues. As Catherine Sansum Kirkman points out, it helps to know your licensing needs.
Virtual Worlds
This month, Andrea L. Ames moves beyond animation basics to discuss keyframe animation and interpolation techniques.
Programming with Perl
Randal L. Schwartz proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks as he dusts off an old link-verification script and adds some cool new features.
Java Alley
With the new version of the Java Development Kit (JDK), come many changes. Bruce Eckel walks you through the new features in the JDK 1.1.
D E P A R T M E N T S :
Lab Notes
Adding a search facility to your Web site begins with choosing the right search engine. Alex Lange sorts through some of the candidates.
Script Junkie
Both Microsoft and Netscape have announced standards for providing HTML-based help on your Web site. Nancy Hickman looks at NetHelp, Netscape's framework, and shows how to develop Help for applications using JavaScript.
Special Report
Earlier this year, 500 of the top 3D interactive developers and researchers gathered to share ideas, technologies and applications at the VRML '97 Symposium. Our nomad reporter, Sue Wilcox weighs in with her thoughts from the ACM-sponsored event.
The Home Page
Editor-in-Chief Michael Floyd talks about "Coding with Style."
News & Notes
3D Developers Catch the Wave; Java for Dummies.
The Last Page
Michael Swaine talks about "Revolution by Jerks."
