http://www.tiac.net/~sw/2003/11/dribble_glass.html

Being in a slideshow on Play is like the feeling of having cruise control on and encountering traffic or tricky turns. Yikes, Duh! Um!–tap the break! All of a sudden the car, instead of being an expression of your will, is an independent heedless projectile with you as passenger. Automated slideshows drop you into that situation unasked. (Except, okay, the feeling in your guts that you’re about to physically collide with something is an illusion in this case.)

Non-automated slideshows on the web are often differently awkward: individual pages with buttons (that you often have to scroll to reach) for back, up and next that are just links to pages, so you pile up a list of pages in your browser’s Back history. And of course it doesn’t start fetching the next page until you hit Next.

“This is one example where Apple got it wrong *because* they sweated the details.” This had me unsure for a second, but, No. Microsoft Word, for instance, has all sorts of automated features that required thoughtfulness and effort to add–but happen to be wrong. So, it must be that “sweating the details” means sweating until the bad ideas have left your system. Apple failed to sweat that automated play button out.

Because I like the full screen functionality, and I suppose that to someone at Apple, full screen == slideshow, which they also equate with auto-advance. Whenever you hit the “full screen” button, the OS helpfully pushes the “play” button for you. This is one example where Apple got it wrong *because* they sweated the details.

You’re right. This is a good, though not great, example.

One point: while I liken this to movies, it’s not – it’s its own little niche medium, somewhere between radio and comic books in how it works.

btw – For anyone interested in visual storytelling, I recommend – alongside Tuft’s books, Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics.’

As for Pulsar, enjoy, and tell your friends. Enemies too!

Ryan: Why use a slideshow at all? Select multiple files and hit spacebar, then just use the right/left arrows. Or just hit one, then up and down. But indeed, pretty much any automated slideshow is troublesome.

Claire: I think that (huge amounts of badly formatted text) is a problem with PowerPoint presentations too, just about anything where one person controls the “playback” rate.

As Scott mentions, slide shows that include narration are a different story. For example, Larry Lessig’s 2006 LinuxWorld conference keynote, Free Culture: What we need from you, is presented as a video. (Lessig also has a number of other videos of talks available using this style of presentation on his site.)

Automated slideshows only make sense when showing a series of slides to a large group of people, and then only if you don’t want to comment on them (think of the lecturer who clicks to advance slides, explaining each one, which sounds a lot like Scott’s Soundslides).

I grabbed one more or less at random off the SoundSlides site.

http://extras.montereyherald.com/slideshows/zeppelin121108/index.html

You’re right – they tend to not use much text, other than inter-titles, although I have seen a few that used text creatively.

s.

btw – I sent a note to support thanking you for giving away Pulsar to users of your other products, but let me say it here directly – thanks. I’m a huge fan of Rogue Amoeba’s stuff.

Just as you say, that sounds much more like a movie than a slideshow. That requires the creator to take some responsibility for “directing”, but if they fail, it’s on them, not the technology.

I’m a usability obsessive too, and agree with you in principle. However, I want to cut out a large exception – a favorite application of mine is SoundSlides, which is used, as the name suggests, to combine audio and still pictures.

It’s aimed at journalists, enabling them to put together stories without having to muck about in Flash.

A well-done SoundSlides treats you like a passenger – someone else is controlling the pace for the purpose of telling a story in a particular way, with a particular rhythm.

Slideshows done for that purpose are closer, it seems to me, to movies. You have to let the author run it, elsewise you don’t get his/her take – you just get the component parts.

Scott Atkinson
Watertown NY