Revisiting Slideroll

When I started my first "My pictures of the week" post a funny thing happened on the way to the publish button.

Originally the slideshow had a long introduction about trying out Slideroll again and it got a bit long, so I thought it might be wise to separate the two.

What follows are my impressions at the time as I was producing the slideshow.

So I've turned back to Slideroll... which by the way has some nice new features like captions, but still retains some of the annoying habits of my last critique, like being unable to upload my own music. Although I do see a ghosted button on the free version, so either it's only available on the paid version or it's a feature not yet active.

Well look at that, I didn't intend to ramble on about Slideroll again, but as I write this there is one thing that I must point out that could improve Slideroll. Those captions, while nice, still have a ways to go until they are perfect.

There are two options for displaying captions: as an overlay on the pictures and as a box below the Slideroll applet. Now here's the problem: captions over a picture cover up visual real estate and in the case of my captions, that often meant half the picture was under a white box where the text was displayed. In the case of the box version, it's not very aesthetically pleasing and its placement separate from the Slideroll player makes it look like a last second add-on or 3rd party plug-in.

So how do we fix this? From my last write up about Slideroll, I know that Geoffrey P. Gaudreault, the creator of Slideroll, does care about feedback and checks these type of posts, so I've a solution. Add a toggle button for the captions and allow people to turn them on and off to their own desires. Also, while we're at it, let's make that white overlay a shade of translucent gray.