If you read our review of Active SlideShow then you know we loved it. But, we also had some suggestions for features that we felt were missing. Well, that has all changed now that the Pro version of Active SlideShow has been released. Active SlideShow Pro takes Active SlideShow… well pro.
Besides the basic features of Active SlideShow the Pro version adds the ability to add watermark text over your slide show and position it in 9 different locations. You can also control the watermark texts font, size, color, alpha (transparency), angle, alignment and choose it to be bold and/or italic.
You can also set several options for the preloader. The preloader is what is shown while the slide show downloads. For DSL and Cable access it shows for only a few seconds. For dial-up it shows for a much longer time. While not a necessity, it is a nice courtesy feature for those that will view your slide show with a slow connection. You can control the preloaders color, border color and title.
Also, on the General tab is a place to name your slide show, set the background color, set the slide show to loop or not, set it to stream (begins to play before it is all downloaded) as well as setting interactivity options like on click and at end of slide show go to URL. You can also add background music, set the volume, set it to repeat or not and set it to stream or not.
The slides tab is where most of the control over how your images are displayed is located. This tab is a power house tab. You can add a single image or a whole directory of images. you can add text to individual images, music to individual images, and comments to individual images. You can also remove individual images or all of the images.
You can click on an image in the slide list and change the image file itself, how long it is displayed, set a URL for when you click on it, set the target for the URL, set the fill option which controls how the image is fitted in to the allotted screen space, options include squeeze, center, stretch and trim (crop). You can set the background color for each image as well.
Some of the more fun controls for each slide (image) in the slide show include incoming transitions. you can turn this on or off. If you set it to on you can choose a transition effect which includes 21 choices, you can control easing with 20 options, time (how long the transition takes. You can also control motion. this too can be turned on and off. You can control the start position, end position and start and end zoom level.
You can move and control the position in the slide show of individual slides. And, there is a live preview so if you want to see what your chosen settings will look like, simply click on the preview and you will see how it looks.
My only complaint with this Pro version of Active SlideShow is that it lacks a way to set the settings for a slide and then copy them to all slides or selected slides. What this means is if you have several dozen images in your slide show, you are going to spend quite a bit of time setting the transitions, motion options and other controls as you have to do it for each and every image. I hope in the next update that they fix this. Without this ability Active SlideShow Pro quickly becomes a drag to use especially with large slide shows. Other than this flaw Active SlideShow Pro is incredible. Thanks to the Zoom Start and Zoom End controls you can now ensure that your entire image will be shown before the next image is displayed. That was my big complaint with the standard version of Active SlideShow. I hadn’t thought of this solution for the problem, but it is a simple and elegant way to handle it.
Overall, Active SlideShow Pro is worth every penny. It is packed with features and with the new controls you can create some really incredible slide shows. Once the ability to copy settings to other slides is added this will be a perfect extension and the best one for creating web based slideshows. We have put up a demo page that shows you not only what the slide shows look like, but also how you can customize them to look and feel the way you want. They are after all Flash files when done.
