Barack Obama's design team has garnered a lot of praise for their work on his campaign materials, including the official website. Heck, there have been entire articles devoted to praising their choice of typefaces. One of the cooler elements the Obama team has cooked up for their website is a slideshow-like animated list for front page navigation.
If you're a fan of this slideshow, and you want to create a similar effect on your own site, look no further than the aptly-named BarackSlideshow script. DevThought has come up with a bit of CSS and JavaScript that loads images and animation effects almost identical to the originals. Some users in the comment thread are reporting browser or plug-in specific issues with the script, so your mileage may vary.
Yahoo! has added the ability to view photos in email messages as slideshows without downloading them first. Honestly, we're not entirely certain when this feature was added, but it was brought to our attention by a reader comment. When we looked into it, we found that at least five months ago, there was no photo slideshow feature. And now there is. So we're going to call it a new feature.
In order to view attached images as a slideshow, you'll need to switch to the Yahoo! Mail beta interface. This feature is not available in Yahoo! Mail classic. When you receive an email with attached images, you should see an option to show images. Once you click the button, you should see several thumbnails at the bottom of your message, and the option to view those images as a slideshow.
We're big fans of Piclens, a web browser plugin that lets you create photo slideshows out of search results from sites like Flickr, Google Images, Photobucket, Facebook, and about a dozen other services. PicLens has come a long way since we first covered it back in 2006. At the time, Piclens was only available for Safari.
A few months ago, Piclens released browser plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer. And this week the service released a new version of its browser plugin that supercharges the full-screen slideshows. You can still browse through images using a Flickr-like slideshow with thumbnails at the bottom of your screen and a larger image in the main window.
But the default image browser is now more like a brick wall, where each brick is an image thumbnail. And the wall goes on forever. You can drag a slider at the bottom of the window and zip past images in a way that sort of defies description, which is why we've embedded a video above. You can also click on individual files for a larger view, search for more images from within the slideshow player, or click a link to see the image at its source.
Last year we introduced PicLens as a plug-in for Safari that allowed you to view full screen slideshows of photo galleries and images in a slick interface that nicely integrated with the browsing experience. Since then, support for both Firefox and IE browsers on both Windows and Mac have been added allowing the rest of the world to give this plug-in a try.
For those who haven't heard of it, PicLens supports Google, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Yahoo and a few other image services, making it a nice plug-in if you flip through photos and images on a regular basis, or just want to show off a gallery without downloading it. The slideshow expands to full screen, allowing you to enjoy all that screen real estate you gained with that 30" monitor this Christmas.
Everybody loves a good slideshow, right? Sure, you can go to Flickr, type in a search term and watch the results scroll by. But after a while you might just wind up seeing the same images over and over.
Blogger Play guarantees you'll almost never see the same photos twice. That's because this photo slideshow shows only images that have been recently uploaded to Google's Blogger. And when we say recent, we mean pretty much the last 15 minutes or so.
Most of the tool was written about two years ago, shortly after Blogger added the ability to upload photos. But it was just a toy for in-house workers to see what people were uploading. Now, the team has added some controls that let you adjust the slide speed and move forward and backward. You can also click an image to see the original blog post, or click the "show info" button to see an excerpt from the blog post and the time it was written.
Blogger Play uses Google's SafeSearch to block out adult images, so it should be safe to use at work. If you have a Blogger page and you'd rather not have your images appear on Blogger Play, it looks like your only option is to remove your page from Blogger's listings.
Ever wondered how to create a guided tour for a website, or an easy slideshow of a selection of webpages? Unless you try and capture a series of screenshots, and them arrange them in something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, it's not exactly easy. Thankfully, you will soon be able to do such a thing online (with live-updating website views) as Diigo has previewed a new product called Webslides at the Office 2.0 conference.
If you're wanting to know more about this rather nifty forthcoming tool, then read on as there's video and more after the break.
Being able to access your work wherever you are is key to pretty much anyone involved with the internet. The same goes for creators of movies and slideshows, whether they are for fun, school or for business. Sometimes it might take a little longer than expected to mix a video video or create a slideshow. You might have to finish while on the run, or at different venues, and having these items in an online resource that is universally accessible is key to being able to complete them.
JayCut is such service. This online location gives users the ability to create, edit and publish online movies and slideshows using a set of easy controls. A handful of effect and transitions are also available and music can be uploaded and added to shows. Videos can also be embedded in social networks, blogs and websites. Forget about paying thousands for a pro setup if you're just playing around, JayCut is one online application that could work out just fine.
Animoto is a fun way to add some hollywood to your old, dull, same as everyone else's slideshow. You know those family vacation, special event, or even worse - yawn corporate outing or shareholder meetings. Animoto isn't the kiss of death to Powerpoint unfortunately, but it will add some zip and keep people's eyes open when it's "your turn" to show 'em something.
In beta, Animoto is a web application that generates a professionally produced video with music using your photos. At its core is a technology that analyzes and combines your images and music with the post-production savvy of a hollywood film editor. Below is a sample video produced in 5 minutes (or less) for this post.
The service is free for as many 30 seconds videos as you want, or $3 each for extended length videos. They also have a $30 annual pass that provides unlimited access. While you do have the option of uploading your own music, Animoto has a slick library of its own divided into 3 groups, Indie Rock, Electronica or Hip Hop.
You have the option of emailing your video, embedding it on your blog or website and posting it as a widget on your social network of choice. See screenshot below:
Nice touch is you retain all rights to your content. Animoto assumes no copyright to your material. And coming soon is the ability to download videos to your computer, and send videos to your cellphone.
We like Animoto's no hassle ease of use and its professional results. We definitely would like to see the ability to add your own captions or titles, maybe even illustrations to further customize your creation - and with that perhaps less reliance on the overdone, stick a fork in it, the ever present, Powerpoint presentation.
The founders of Animoto are veterans of the entertainment industry and are headquartered in NYC.
Google has added yet another document preview button to Gmail. You could already preview Word documents and spreadsheets sent as file attachments using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Now if you receive an email with an attached PowerPoint presentation, you can view the slideshow in your web browser with no need to download.
The PowerPoint viewer is pretty simple. When you click on "View as a slideshow" a new browser tab opens up with the first slide. You can click back and forth, but you can't organize the slides or edit them in any way.
Google does plan to add presentations to its online office suite this summer. In April the company purchased Tonic Systems, a company with experience in document conversion and presentation applications. The email preview option is probably just a sneak peak of things to come.
It's still pretty useful. Most computer users can go their whole lives without ever needing to create a slideshow presentation. But it's pretty handy to have an application that can read them without shelling out the big bucks on Office. Of course, there's always Open Office, but if all you need is a presentation viewer, installing Open Office is sort of like swatting at a fly with a shotgun.
Look out Flickr, Picasa Web Albums just dropped a fancy new feature that makes it all too easy - and sexy - to share photo albums. Google's web-based photo sharing service has introduced an Embed Slideshow feature that offers a snippet of code one can easily use to display an album on their website or blog. It's pretty flexible too: five size options are available, ranging from Small 144px wide all the way up to Extra-extra Large at a whopping 800px wide. Captions can also be toggled on and off, and it's all wrapped up in a pretty Flash slideshow movie with controls that only pop up when you mouse over it.
This is a great feature that should definitely turn some heads towards Picasa (including Mac users, now that they offer a free iPhoto plugin), though their 1GB (and growing!) free storage limit is still a little too constricting. Sure, the service offers commercial upgrades with more yearly space, but those prices are a bit on the 'spensive side considering how far and fast storage costs are dropping as of late.
PicLens is a slideshow plug-in for Safari that adds a full-screen browsing mode for viewing pictures on Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Ask.com Images. If you've got a newer Mac which has an Apple Remote, you can use it to advance through photos. It's very slick and unobtrusive, and perfect if you've got your Mac setup as a media center to your television. Never fear, Firefox and Internet Explorer users, they are promising versions for those browsers as well.
This morning I saw a blog post on the CodeJam blog about a new update to MemoriesOnTV, but the big item in the post was that they were bringing back MemoriesOnWeb, a freeware slideshow creator application.
The application uses the same engine as MemoriesOnTV so you have lots of features and control. In the slideshow you can mix multiple audio tracks and sync up your photos to the audio. And with the pan/zoom effects on pictures you can give movement to still photos.
They do have some tips on their site for running it, which lists some codecs you should have for best user experience. And the projects created in this and MemoriesOnTV are compatible and can be loaded in each. Check out some screens after the jump.
Back on August 30 CodeJam released version 3.1 of their MemoriesOnTV software. And they have just released another bug fix update on the 20th of this month. I have been using this software since it was called "PictureToTV", and they have really added to the power and ease of this software over the years.
To see all the features in a nice side by side of the two versions available of the software you can check out the features page over at the CodeJam site.
Some screen shots from the CodeJam site after the jump.
Corel has decided to give away some of its software as free and instantly downloadable. The software package available is Corel Snapfire, a photo organizing tool that shares, edits, prints, and creates slide shows and montages. Corel does offer an upgraded to Snapfire called Snapfire Plus, for $39.99. Snapfire Plus adds more movie effect and editing tools into the mix. Snapfire is similar to Google's photo organization tool Picasa.
Scooch is a web-based slideshow app built using web standards. The online slideshow allows you to develop your very own slideshow of images. When the slideshow is published on your website, users can comment on photos in your set, and leave feedback.
In order to run and develop slide shows with Scooch, users have to download the application files. The application is built using PHP, thus will have to run on a web server that has PHP support. Setup is fairy easy and straightforward. Scooch has a very thorough User Manual, with instructions on the structural markup which will allow you customize your slide show layout.
Have fun, and drop a note with your Scooch URL if you try it out!
Scooch
