Software & GIF Formatted Images

John Gallagher & John McCann
Last update: March 20, 1996

This is a group of support materials and related WWW sites associated with authoring software and gif-formatted images. We have listed sites for obtaining free software. If you have difficulties obtaining a piece of software from a listed site, you can use a search engine such as Infoseek to find other locations. Also, Katsoft Information Services maintains a list of sites for software downloads, and the Ziff Davis Web site has a software library from which you can download free software. If you have comments or suggestions, please send email to
mccann@mail.duke.edu.

Shareware

The following sites contain shareware, drivers, and information about Windows 95:

Getting your own copy of HTML Assistant

Instructions for acquiring HTML Assistant are contained at this link.

Getting your own copy of PKUnzip

Instructing for acquiring and installing PKUnzip are at this link.

Getting a copy of LviewPro

In the Fuqua computer labs, and as part of your CMLE installation at home, you have access to a graphics program named Lview3.1. This program is used primarily as a "gif" and "jpeg" file viewer in Netscape. However, there is another version of Lview that has additional capabilities. For those of you who have learned about "transparent" gif files, and "interlaced" gif files, you may be interested in acquiring a copy of LviewPro. This software is shareware, and can be downloaded using the link below.

It is a large file, about 300k, and is in zip format. To install it you only need to:

  1. Create a new directory on your hard drive, such as lviewpro.
  2. Unzip all the files in lviewp1a.zip into this directory.
  3. Add the lviewp1a.exe file to one of your groups in Windows.

Click here to download lviewp1b.zip.

Remember, this is only of interest if you have a need for the transparent and interlaced gif file formats that are supported in Netscape. Additional information is available here.

Additional information about Lview is available here.

Icons and Images

Below are the names of several zipped files. These contain a number of gif format image files that are potentially useful in developing WWW pages. These files originally came from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. The images in the various files are matched in terms of colors and use a nice naming scheme that allows you to find what you are looking for. The size of each file appears next to its name, so you can get a feel for the time required to transfer them if you are connected via modem. To transfer these files, just click on the name. You will be prompted regarding where to store the files on you computer. For those of you who do not have a copy of the PKUNZIP utility to unpack these and other zip files, there is a link below. This link is to a site that provides several utilities for downloading. You can find pkunzip on the list and click on it to have a copy of the file transferred to your PC. Alternatively, you can download the entire set of pkzip utilities from the Fuqua Gopher from the Utilities directory.


Here are some additional links to interesting sources for icons, images and other HTML resources:

Video and Sound Viewers

The FSB network contains Netscape 2 along with several helper applications such as Lview and NAPlayer. You can add other products to your personal Netscape installation by downloading and installing helper software and/or Netscape plugins. A viewer is a software product that you use to "view" files that are linked to HTML pages. For instance, Lview is commonly used to view GIF or JPEG images. Lview is termed a Helper Application because it helps Netscape (and you) ... Netscape does not have to write and maintain commonly used software. Other software is available for video files, audio files, animation files, etc. A plugin serves as an enhancement to Netscape itself. Netscape contains the software necessary for the display of GIF and JPEG images within the pages ... the so-called "inline images." Rather than expand Netscape to permit the inline support for the many the many other types of objects (an image is a type of object) that one might want to imbed in a page, Netscape, Inc. has created the facility for software from other vendors to be "plugged into" Netscape ... thus the term plugin.

If you want to add some video and alternative sound viewers to your home installation of Netscape, you can just click on the links below and follow the instructions. Be sure to read any "readme" files and the like carefully. (Some of these programs require the Windows 32-bit extensions, Win32s. A link to the Win32s and their installation instructions are also included below.)

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