Below are some references to web sites and related information that you may find useful or interesting.

Tired of being told you cant see a web page properly because you don't have the latest biggest browser from the best company, and installed all the indispensable plugins that take forever to download and mess up all your system settings if you do? Tired of those web pages that eat up bandwidth and your telephone bill showing you tacky superfluous animations, that have nothing to do with the simple text you're tying to read, except that they're getting in your face? So are we.

The gif graphics format is a very popular file format especially for animations on the internet. The main problem with gif (and one that most people didn't know about until it was too late) is that reading/writing a file in this format requires using a patented algorithm (technically termed "LZW (de)compression"). After Gif was created by CompuServe over a decade ago, the company holding the patent (Unisys) kept quiet and watched it grow in popularity.

Then suddenly they announced that they would be charging everybody who used Gif. They demand exorbitant fees for the (legal) use of even a single tiny gif graphic. Thankfully some very clever and generous people have recently developed an alternative and better format. In fact they've developed two: one specially for still images called png and one for animations called mng:

Almost all the graphics in GeoAze are png images. You can find further information about Png (Portable Network Graphics) at  http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/

Whereas Png is designed for still images, Mng is for animated graphics. You can find further information about Mng (Multiple-image Network Graphics) at http://www.libnmg.com and http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ . These non-profit motivated projects are very creditworthy and deserve any support they can get.

Adobe Acrobat Reader   is a free program which can be used to view and print "pdf" documents. Pdf ("Portable Document Format") has established itself as a standard for printable documents on the internet. You can download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader from Adobe's web site  http://www.adobe.com.

We wish to point out that Silverglint receives no remuneration whatsoever for any information presented here. These are solely products or projects that we, from experience, are convinced of the quality and merit of, and thought you might be interested in hearing about them and/or benefit from them in some way.