Big doings here at aeolist.net – A total revamp of the homepage slideshow developed using the Macintosh app Hype. Hype is an HTML 5 creation tool that builds simple animations to compete, in a limited way, with Flash. For those of us who want to have sites that work the same for iOS and PC browsers avoiding Flash is very important.
I’ve been experimenting with a number of alternatives that allow creation of visually interesting slideshows for the site that go beyond a simple static presentation. I tried iMovie to create Ken Burns type effects with static images but found that the movies created were of too low quality to be acceptable. I purchased and tried Photo To Movie that offered more flexibility than iMovie but found that while the slideshow-movies were of high quality file, sizes were very large and slow to load in the browser and there were issues of file compatibility between browsers and platforms. Photo To Movie is likely to have a role in some of my presentations but not for this particular purpose.
Hype is a new, version 1.0, application that is very easy to use but seems to me (a non-expert) to be lacking some features. It is very easy to use but somewhat repetitive and tedious. There are few automated ways to do things in the program without resorting to Javascript. Since I’m not Javascript savvy, I had to build my project using the GUI which took some time and resulted in some frustration. I am, however, hopeful that new versions of the program will address these issues. Since there’s a lot of buzz around the program and the developers seem to be responsive to users I think that this program will evolve into a more powerful tool as time goes on.