Any developer often has to decide whether to use a third party tool to accomplish something or to do it themselves. Admittedly there are a lot of tools out there that are more hassle than they are worth. However, occasionally something comes along that makes your life so much easier and is so cost effective that there really can't be any debate as to whether or not to use it. SlideShowPro is one of these tools that ThoughtLab uses over and over. In fact, once you start to recognize the characteristics of SlideShowPro's interface and buttons you will find this tool being used all over the web.
In using SlideShowPro there is no need to know ActionScript unless you want to unlock much more powerful functionality. It is totally customizable through the Component Inspector settings as seen below:
[caption id="attachment_33" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="SlideShowPro Screenshot"][/caption]
Although learning the configuration of the settings is a bit tedious, once they are learned the value comes in a matter of creating a few different templates that accomplish the major functional differences and then just reusing these templates over and over with minor tweaks to colors and backgrounds. It is also worth knowing that there are also minor changes that will be needed to an xml document for each use of SlideShowPro.
What is Needed:
- A license of SlideShowPro
- A licensed version of Adobe Flash
- An XML editor - something as simple as a text editor can be used but will be easier to handle with a simple tool like Adobe Dreamweaver
- An image editor of some kind to manage the images - there are many tools available for this but I am not as familiar with the more basic of these since I use Adobe Photoshop
