Post Archive
› February 14, 2005
SlideShow Pro
The most you ever got out of $20 is now available from Todd Dominey: SlideShow Pro.
Slideshow is a Macromedia Flash based photo gallery that is completely customizable, loads photos from XML, and can sync up your favorite MP3s to play. The gallery actually holds multiple galleries, so you can literally have thousands of photos organized however you wish. Heck, you can even tie it into your Flickr account!
Todd's outdone himself with this one, check out the well organized and resourceful website at http://www.slideshowpro.net/, you'll find a million ways to use this.
Comments
1. February 14, 2005 02:08 PM
2. February 14, 2005 06:29 PM
Angus Turnbull Posted…
Hmm. Flash can give some neat effects (in this case, very neat effects indeed!), but is it really worth the accessibility tradeoff given what you can accomplish with JavaScript and the DOM these days?
I've written an animating photo slideshow script myself that is based on <UL> lists of links to images in the page and CSS formatting. It has a fair few other features and effects, albeit no MP3 playback or inbuilt RSS support like SlideShowPro, but you could easily make galleries of RSS feeds with a short PHP script. But nevertheless, my point is that it's quite possible to do a decently usable slideshow using only web standards.
So, as web developers/evangelists I feel we should probably only be encouraging the use of Flash for actual movie-like content rather than browser interfaces to web content. For instance, saving images to disk or opening them up in new windows is very problematic with Flash, but a breeze if you stick to HTML/CSS/JS.
3. February 15, 2005 12:43 AM
Jay Posted…
Freakin awesome! Purchased, downloaded, formatted to my clients site, everyone is very happy and I'm makin money.
What a great piece of Flash. Worth far more than $20.
4. February 15, 2005 09:11 AM
Bill Posted…
why do you say Flash is not accessible? It can be just as accessible as an image file. I was under the impression that Flash supports captioning which can be read by screen readers. I know for a fact it has captioning capabilities - but I'm not certain it is available to a screen reader. Does anyone know?
if the flash caption is available to the screen reader then how is it any less accessible than a bunch of images with alt text?
5. February 15, 2005 05:05 PM
6. February 23, 2005 04:25 PM
Beerzie Boy Posted…
This is a very cool product, indeed. Looks like something one could have a lot of fun with. In response to Bill's comment, I have to say that, as a person who views a lot of images online and needs to reference them in e-mails or document their locations in lists, that Flash galleries can be somewhat frustrating. We review a lot of photos and solicit a lot of photographers, and when an image is embedded in a Flash gallery, it can be difficult to send to another editor to look at it or even to tell an artist which one we want to use, especially if the captions are cryptic or non-existent. While a Flash gallery can provide an artist with a slick interface, I wonder if the lack of linkability can have its costs?
I am especially curious what people think, as I would like to incorporate Flash galleries on my own photography sites.
Curcan Ovidiu Posted…
Awsome.