Enabling Technologies

Enabling Technology can often be an empty buzz­word that encap­su­lates other just as empty buzz­words that only an old school mar­keter could love. On the other hand, it can also describe use­ful tech­nolo­gies that truly empower users and let them accom­plish new tasks they couldn’t do before or help then do things eas­ier, faster and with more pos­i­tive results than before. The rea­son I’m bring­ing this up now is that I dis­cov­ered such enabling soft­ware last week that really got me excited.

Recently, I had been look­ing for a way to imple­ment photo gal­leries with easy nav­i­ga­tion and thumb­nails both for this site and a new client site I’ll start design­ing soon for a local artist-​painter. I’ve been look­ing at many pho­tog­ra­phers and painters’ sites to see how they were doing it and I was baf­fled to dis­cover that many of those sites had very poor imple­men­ta­tions of this kind of fea­ture which is very impor­tant for that type of site. There had to be a bet­ter way.

My first incli­na­tion was to build some kind of gallery fea­ture in Dreamweaver myself using DHTML. I have never been too keen on using Flash prob­a­bly in large part because my Flash skills are not very exten­sive. I learned Flash 3 very well at the time but haven’t “updated” my Flash skills much as the app has evolved into the deep and com­plex appli­ca­tion it has become today. I have pre­ferred to improve my knowl­edge of other Web design and devel­op­ment related sub­jects instead of Flash.

In any case, last week I stum­bled onto a news­group post­ing that rec­om­mended SlideShowPro for build­ing this kind of func­tion­al­ity and after try­ing it for a few min­utes that’s when the term “enabling tech­nol­ogy” popped into my head. Talk about a pow­er­ful piece of soft­ware for a very small price. I got so excited about it that I wanted to share it here.

SlideShowPro is a very full fea­tured Flash com­po­nent that does a lot more than its name implies and all that for a measly $ 20. Most of its com­peti­tors cost 3 to 4 times as much and do not offer the sophis­ti­cated nav­i­ga­tional and organ­i­sa­tional fea­tures that SlideShowPro offers. It may not auto­mate the cre­ation of the XML file it uses to load pic­tures but third party devel­op­ers have cre­ate some very sophis­ti­cated admin web apps in PHP ($5.00) and ColdFusion (free) that seem to do the job really well. I’ll be try­ing the ColdFusion one soon when I imple­ment a gallery of my own pho­tographs on this site. The new sec­tion will be called pixel gallery and I should have it up within a week or two. More on that and other great soft­ware I’ve dis­cov­ered later…