Simpletext Java Applet

I have been looking for this very applet for the past 3 monthes. And necessity being the mother of invention. I wrote it.

I had a problem using my home page at work. I needed to have an area that would be updated on the fly that didn't require modification of the HTML. I needed to be able to open an external text file.

All of the solutions that I had found were animation based. They each had three problems

1. They were slow to load and launch (users would stop the loading just to get to the links quicker, meaning that information wasn't being read).
2. They displayed information slowly (often 20+ seconds to read all the scrolling text)
3. They animations were distracting to have running all the time. I had users creating private home pages with just the links so they wouldn't look at the animation.

Clearly there had to be a better way to provide information. An applet that loaded quickly, provided information in an easy and quick to read fashion. An applet without animation, and provided some flexibility of design.

This is that Applet.

It can be customized in the following ways

1. It cleanly fits the applet space as specified in the width and height tags.

2. You can point to an external text file to load in

3. You can change the font and the font size.

Thats it. Blinding simplicity and extreme usefulness. Too bad this wasn't done before.

Source and Class File

How to use it...

Download the class file and copy it to your web site (easiest if you put it in the same location as your web page).

Put into your page the below code. (you can also see this by looking at the document source for this page)

"filename" value is the fully qualified URL to your external file

"fontname" value is the fontname you would like, (generally supported are TimesRoman, Helvetica, and Courier). I have used Comic Sans MS on my site at work as the vast majority of the clients that see this are WIN95.

"fontsize" value is the height in points that you want to select.

<Applet Code = "simpletext.class" Width = "500" Height = "300">
<PARAM NAME = "filename" VALUE = "http://www.oz.net/~johnm/2.txt">

<PARAM NAME = "fontname" VALUE = "TimesRoman">
<PARAM NAME = "fontsize" VALUE = "18">
</Applet>

More stuff

I hope to be making more simple, useful and stealable applets. Do you have any ideas?

Comments and suggestions to

John MacIntyre

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