Running these Applets

Most of the pages on my web site have "live illustrations." These actually run little interactive programs called applets. To do what I mean them to do, these applets make some demands on the browser. Pages like the look at Zome, which use three-dimensional graphics, are particularly demanding; the others may be less so.

On any system and any browser, if the applets run, but seem to behave erratically, "emptying the cache" may clear up the problem.

On Apple computers

The live illustrations will not run on OS 9 browsers. Some pages will look badly laid out on OS 9 browsers.

For Mac OS X, Apple's browser "Safari" is free, and up-to-date for the needs of this web site. Note, however, that the first version required at least Mac OS X 10.2.8, whereas the latest version requires at least Mac OS X 10.3.

There are other browsers available free on Mac OS X. Camino, Firefox, and Mozilla, and Netscape are all very similar. Internet Explorer is available for Mac OS X, but has not been updated recently.

Most of my pages look OK on all of these browsers. For the three-dimensional figures, browsers other than Safari need an installation of the Java runtime support version 1.4. This is available to download, but you have to do some more work to get the browsers to use it. Mozilla has an informative page about this. I regret to say that I do not know any way to get Internet Explorer on Mac OS X to use Java version 1.4.

For three-dimensional effects, my applets depend on Java 3D. This is available from Apple.

On Windows

My understanding is that Java is not pre-installed on Windows computers. Java 2 Standard Edition, v 1.4, which is the latest, can be downloaded from Sun Microsystems. That page offers many choices, the one labelled "J2SE JRE" should be taken. There is also a page of installation notes.

Last modified on $Date: 2007-12-11 22:13:52 -0500 (Tue, 11 Dec 2007) $

Christopher J. Henrich