prinothcat wrote:exposed wrote:Pity ! Flickr slideshow facility is far superior to pBase.
Why can't pBase keep their site up to modern times with Flash?
Many of us here have a real love to hate relationship with flash media. I for one hate it. It's far to proprietary for many of us, and works in a very random fashion on non mainstream platforms.
I
used to hate it when I was on dial up, but when it's well implemented (and that's a significant qualification, I hasten to add) I think that it can be extremely enhancing for a site. I still get a little bit narky about sites which don't offer an html alternative, though. (Although in some cases it would involve so much work that it might be unreasonable to expect it, especially considering how widespread the Flash plugin is.) Proprietary doesn't bother me in this case, since Adobe tends to be more generous with their proprietary standards than another certain company I could name; to create a .pdf, for example, you don't
have to purchase Adobe Acrobat Professional. If there's a proprietary technology that DOES give me the pips, it's Silverlight. Especially as M$ now has this cute little idea of making some of their sites inaccessible without it. "But it's freeeee! And it's wooonnnnderrrful!" they say. "Screw you", I say, and go and look at a different site instead.
"Non-mainstream" can bite itself as well as far as I'm concerned. If a site runs on IE, Firefox and Safari, I really don't care if some self-perceived "rugged individualist" can't run it on the open source Glublish browser running on some obscure variation of Xenix.
I hate to say it, but Exposed has a point. The slideshow on Flickr (and I say this as someone who thoroughly detests Flicker on other grounds, not least its lack customisability, and making the display of your photos subservient to their themes) is indeed vastly superior to the pBase offering. In some ways it's even better than the SmugMug one that I saw the other day. It's not perfect, though:
- It doesn't let you choose the exact size that you want for the slideshow (it only has the option of "embiggen small things to fit the screen" (hmm, thank you Jebediah Springfield...))
- It doesn't seem to allow Exif to be displayed as the slides are presented; but
- It DOES allow you to easily "full screen" the show; and
- It DOES allow you to turn on the display of captions as the slideshow plays. That's something that would be seriously useful. Unfortunately these are displayed as semi-transparent captions at the bottom rather than below the images or, if they're portrait orientation, off to the side.
Last edited by akmc_in_au on Sun Oct 19, 2008 12:39 am, edited 1 time in total.