Slide Shows and more...
While I was authoring the slideshow extender in the AJAX Control Toolkit I happened to find a very interesting company that actually does *just* slide shows for a living, called Slide, of course with more bells and whistles. There is a Redmond based company called SmileBox which does something very similar as well.
They both overlap in the core aspects, i.e. being able to create a custom slide show to transition smoothly through a set of pictures. But what I found particularly interesting was Slide allows you to pull your pictures from your MySpace, Flickr, Facebook accounts and many more data-sources. There is a caveat though. You need to login and provide your respective account credentials, which they claim they will not use. That being said, it is a cool picture aggregator (It reminded me of Meebo which is the IM webclient). It leverages the fact that people are inherently lazy and do not want to upload pictures to ten different sites and makes for easier and faster adoption. You can then just copy the html and paste it into your page/blog. The cosmetic theming aspect adds particular flair to the slide shows. You no longer need to be a Flash expert to create cool, custom, personalized greeting components and share them with your friends and family easily.
I had thought about this over two months ago when we were deciding on what our MIX07 plans were going to be. A project like this to evangelize the WPF/E technology, Microsoft’s version of Flash++, would be awesome. But it did not fit into our team’s charter…sob sob. Anyways, taking it to the next level, imagine though that the components are user driven. I, as a developer, could create programmable WPF/E components that could be used by end users in collages (greetings, scrap-books, diagrams, slideshows etc.). The API’s supported by the component would be exposed in UI via reflection and users would be able to add that to their site and customize them. This would be much easier to achieve in managed code which WPF/E will support.
In short a “Create my Web Art or Wiki art” style web application that
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Allows for a controls to have a generic platform where they can be uploaded.
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Allows for the control API’s to be exposed for manipulation in a generic fashion
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Allows for overlaying of controls on a canvas to form more complex components (generating xaml on the fly)
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Allows for storyboard settings and mutual interaction between components on the canvas
This would then be a forum for both budding wpf/e developers wanting to showcase their work and allow end users to generate fun interactive yet complex xaml components from a medley of pre-existing work. Could somebody be doing that for a living? I am sure they are already out there…
Till then I will continue improving the Toolkit Slideshow. Suggestions/Comments are most welcome.
