Slide Show
(Version 1.11 for the PowerMac)
by Glen Bredon


Keyboard Commands during Show

LEFT ARROW Sets reverse direction and brings up previous slide
immediately.

RIGHT ARROW Sets normal direction and brings up next slide immediately.

MOUSE BUTTON Next slide in selected direction (only if clicked near bottom
of screen).

SPACE  Pauses slide (restart with another press of the space
bar).

DELETE or DEL Marks slide for deletion only if Pause is in effect (else does
nothing). You cannot miss this; it puts a big red X over the slide on the
screen. It then waits for another command (a second DELETE cancels it; another
press of the space bar un-pauses it, etc.).

ESCAPE   Brings up "Delete OK" dialog box if there are files marked
for deletion. If you select OK then, and only then, the marked files are moved
to the trash folder; they are never actually deleted. 

+ Adds one second to the slide duration.

- Subtracts one second from the slide duration (until
the minimum 1).

1-9  Sets slide duration to that number of seconds. Key 0
sets the fastest possible display, a type of fast forward, and is only available
from the keyboard; not from the duration menu.

Operation upon Startup

When run, the program searches for a folder named SLIDES in the folder
containing the Slide Show program. You can change this in "Preferences" under
the File menu.

If this folder is not found then it searches in this order for one of the
following folders in the boot volume:

SLIDES
PHOTOGRAPHY:SLIDES
SYSTEM FOLDER:APPEARANCE:DESKTOP PICTURES:PHOTOS
APPLE EXTRAS:SAMPLE DESKTOP PICTURES

If one of these is found then the pictures in it are automatically displayed in
a slide show. If none of them exist or if the first one found does not contain
displayable pictures then nothing happens and you can select a folder containing
slides using the "Choose Slide Folder" item in the File menu.

General Operation

QuickTime should be installed on your PowerMac (it probably is) or only PICT
type files can be displayed. Use the Extensions Manager to check that QuickTime
is active. (If you don't have it, you can download it from Apple Computer's web
site.)

Slides are displayed so as to use the maximum area of the screen. They are
automatically resized to fit your screen exactly; no insignificant little images
in the middle of nothing.

Use "Select Slide Folder" from the File menu to select a new folder to display.
The new show should start immediately. To restart a show select Start Show
(Command G).

Slide shows repeat forever until paused (space bar) or the program is quit. In
the menus, you can choose to have slides presented in reverse order, random
order, creation or modification date order or the default alphabetic order.

Frames

In the Frames menu list you can elect to have frames added to your slides as
they are displayed, and the frame size can be adjusted. Frame color adjustments
can be made in the Preferences item in the File menu. The "Shadow Size" option
in the Frames menu refers to the dark line between the frame and the picture.
Experiment to see what you like.

Captions

Captions, when enabled, are formed from the file names of the pictures. You can
elect to have the true file names used, or the aliases of them instead if the
selected folder contains aliases.

The captions are placed at the bottom of the screen for horizontal pictures and
at the left for verticals.

File name extensions such as ³.jpg² or ³.gif² or "alias" etc. (indeed, any four
character segment beginning with a period) are ignored when forming the caption
title.

Beginning numerical digits in file names are also omitted from the caption; this
allows renaming files (or aliases) by putting a number or date at the start in
order to have your MacIntosh sort the directory using this data. For example you
could use names such as "19870307My Picture" (where the numbers represent the
date, March 7, 1987, when the picture was taken) and the Caption would be "My
Picture."  Personally, I use 19955403 to mean frame #03 of roll #54 of year
1995, but this only works if you use less than a hundred rolls per year, or you
must add a extra digit or two.  Remember that you can do this using the true
file names, or aliases if you prefer provided that the use of aliases for
captions is selected in the Captions menu item.

Moreover, any non-alphanumeric characters (except period) at the end of the file
name are ignored for the caption. This feature is intended to provide targets
for the find option, particularly when used in a saved show. This gives you many
powerful options in organizing the way pictures will be displayed by the slide
show. (Remember that these provisions can be used with aliases if so desired,
leaving the actual filenames unchanged.)

Find

The "Find Slides" item in the File menu lets you select three search items using
various criteria (such as "starts with," "contains," "does not contain"). Then
the show will present only those slides from the selected folder meeting these
criteria. Note that if the folder is large it may take a few seconds for a slide
to be found if several dozen must be passed over. (After the first slide that
will just mean that some slides may be displayed for a longer period than
specified in the duration menu.) Note that you can have Find operate on alias
names rather than the actual names of the slides and that this is independent of
the use, or not, of aliases for captions.

Save/Open Show

The "Save Show" item in the File menu creates a very small file containing all
the parameters presently set up (including folder name, frame, caption and color
options, duration, find options and so on). If that file is double clicked (or
selected with the Open Show command in the File menu) then all that data is
loaded and the specified folder is opened and run as a slide show. To set up
special preferences for such shows, select "Preferences" from the File menu and
set up your new preferences, but exit by the "Use but Don't Save" button rather
than the "Save" button. (If you use "Save" they become your default preferences,
which you may not like.) Then save the show with the "Save Show" item in the
File Menu. Note that you can have many different shows based on the same slide
folder but differing in the Find options, in particular.

Export Show

The "Export Show" item in the File menu is the same as the "Save Show" item
except that it forces the use of the slide folder named "Slides" in the same
location as the exported file. It is intended to simplify sending a show to
another person. Use it as follows:

Create a new folder to be sent to someone. Move the little file created by
"Export Show" into this folder along with a copy of the Slide Show program if
the recipient does not already have that. Create a new folder inside that one
naming it "Slides" and put the picture files you wish to send into this "Slides"
folder. They can be, but do not have to be, the same files you were looking at
when you did the "Export Show." Then send the folder after compacting it in any
way you can. The recipient can put the folder anywhere he wants. This has the
following effect:

When the user double clicks on the exported show icon, the slides in the
"Slides" folder are displayed with all the preferences that were in effect when
you exported the show. (Note that this includes any "Find" specification; so you
may want to be sure that there are none of those before you export the show.)
Double clicking on the Slide Show program instead will either bring up the same
show, but with the default preferences if the recipient does not have an
existing preferences file for Slide Show, or it will act on his preferences if
he does. Thus, the whole point of the "Export Slides" provision is to give a
means to transport the preferences such as frame color and duration along with
whatever slides you are sending, plus it forces use of the "Slides" folder you
provide with it.

Rename Slides

The "Rename Slides" item in the Files menu presents each slide for renaming.
When the rename dialog is presented there are two special features which
simplify certain tasks: the Control-Q key will lop off the last four characters
of the name (intended for deleting those awful MSDOS extensions such as ".jpg");
and the Control-W key changes all dashes to spaces (intended to easily
counteract the inexplicable opposite action done by Adobe ImageReady droplets).
An Undo restores the original name. File renaming does not actually take place
until you come to the end of the folder or you select the "Quit Renaming" item
in the rename dialog box. Then you are given a chance to abort the whole thing
or to accept it.  Please note that there is no check that your new names are
unique; if not then some files will not be renamed because the Mac system will
not permit duplicate file names.  (I.e., nothing bad will happen except that
some of your renaming may be rejected.) The main reason for the rename provision
is to make it easy to add numbers to the start of the file names, or search
characters to the end, but it is not limited to those purposes.  (I used it to
rename hundreds of my slide files, and would not have attempted that without
this provision of the Slide Show.)  If the files are aliases, the aliases are
renamed and not the targets of the aliases. (You can rename the originals by
selecting the folder containing them instead of a folder containing aliases.)

Preferences

In the preferences under the file menu you can select the default slide
duration, background color, caption color, frames color, and the defaults for
the various menu choices. You can also set the default folder for the slides.

You can delete the preferences file "GEBSlideShow Prefs" in your Preferences
folder to return to all of the defaults. This file does not get written until
you access and change preferences.

Background Operation

Slide show will run in the background (like an ever changing desktop picture)
while you use other programs. Simply run the Slide Show, then switch to another
program (or to the finder, etc.) using the "application menu" usually on the
right of the menu bar, or use the apple menu to access another program.

Memory Requirements

The program is set up to require 20MB of memory which should be adequate for
screen sizes to 768x1024. If you have problems, increase the memory requirement
in the Slide Show file's Finder Info. For a screen size of 1200x1600 the program
may require about 30MB for efficient operation.  For very large files such as
high resolution images you may want to give it considerably more than that.

Suggestions

Since photos are displayed as large as possible (except for the menu bar area)
and this usually means that the display height is 20 pixels less than your
screen height, best results are obtained from pictures sized with such a height.
For example, if your screen, like mine, is 768 pixels high, try to make slides
748 pixels high. (Even better, make verticals that height and horizontals the
width of your screen.) It is not necessary to do this and most good quality
pictures of reasonable size will display quite pleasantly.

If you elect to have frames, these take, in pixels, 4 times the value of "Frame
Width" in the Preferences box, so you can adjust your picture size with this in
mind if you wish.

You can, of course, just put actual pictures in the folder you want to display
in a slide show. However, you can also put aliases of files located elsewhere on
your system. To make aliases easily, open the folder in which you wish to put
the aliases, and the folder containing the original pictures.  Select all the
ones you want in the latter and then hold down the COMMAND and OPTION keys while
you drag the files to the folder to receive the aliases. (You can also use the
Finder's "Make Alias" command and drag the aliases, but this appends "alias" to
the filename making it look messy.)

The "List non-pics" item in the File menu, reads through the directory and
displays those files that the program cannot open as a picture. This is useful
in detecting invalid aliases.  (Deleting and reestablishing the alias usually
fixes the problem.)  The problem with some of these files may be simply that
they are too large for the memory constraints of the program; just increase the
memory allocation.  The slide show warns you about files that are too large;
they cause no damage, but are just not displayed.

Program distribution

This program is freeware, meaning that you may copy it freely and give it away,
but do not sell it. Even though it is free, everything is done "by the book" to
my knowledge; eg., its creator code is registered with Apple Computer.  Let me
know if you like it:

My email:  bredon@sierratel.com
My photographic web site:  www.sierratel.com/bredon