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NewsBanner

Last updated: 08.05.2002

NewsBanner

This is another of those irritating little applets that put something that moves or flickers in a page you're trying to read. I don't know why I keep implementing and publishing these things; it must be some strange atavistic compulsion to promote Web-abuse.

NewsBanner: This is a Java applet. Your browser has not displayed it because it does not support Java, or because you have switched Java off.

And here's another one of the little beasts, with a few more options turned on ...

NewsBanner: This is a Java applet. Your browser has not displayed it because it does not support Java, or because you have switched Java off.

Putting several on the same page is probably a poor idea, and not just for aesthetic reasons. If two of them get in sync with each other, they slow down each other's scrolling. Horizontal scrolls - which have to do much more work - are particularly bad for this.

The applet is implemented by the class NewsBannerApplet. This in turn uses the ExtendedApplet class which is a convenience class implementing parameter parsing.

The strings displayed by the applet should be placed in a plain text file. Blank lines will be skipped; anything else in the file will be displayed. The applets on this page use the NewsBannerStrings and AlternativeStrings files. Note that there's a bug in the applet that causes it to strip out line-initial periods from strings. I hope to fix that soon. There's also currently a limit of 20 strings per file; this is because, in a fit of brainlessness, I used an array rather than a vector to hold the strings. That's something else to fix.

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