I love SlideShowPro for Flash; I think it’s one of the best Flash-based application available, particularly for photo and video slideshows. I’ve purchased the component when it was first introduced several years ago and have been keeping up with it ever since buying many of the supporting products. Todd Dominey has done a superb job with this product with its support and its presentation and I’ve seen its implementation nearly everywhere. In may ways I feel as though I’ve grown up as a developer with SlideShowPro witnessing Todd’s earliest versions.

That’s why it has been hard for me to part ways with it when creating my new portfolio section of my site. I didn’t create a parallel experience in jQuery but I created something that will be better supported on mobile platforms viz. the iPhone. My hope is that Todd and company is developing a SlideShowPro for jQuery and still tap into SlideShowPro Director for organizing slideshows and thumbnails.

I’m not insisting the mobile age is here and therefore let’s neglect Flash nor am I suggesting that the iPhone will never support Flash (although cases have been made against it). Flash’s penetration on non-mobile browsers is unimpeachable therefore it shouldn’t be neglected as a development environment — although many developers have defaulted to jQuery versions of similar functions. I still feel that Flash is still capable of better user experiences than jQuery.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Flash but still long for the days when Flash was the most creative medium on the web. In many ways Flash was and still is the coup de grâce to our browser and platform concerns and much of that technology has evolved into Flex and Adobe AIR. However, Flash is essentially non-existent on mobile browsers even though Flash Lite, the highly optimized version of the Flash runtime, is used on many mobile phones but not in a mobile web browsing capacity.

The New York Times is one of the few organizations I’ve seen that has successful implementations in multiple environments having an iPhone application, an Adobe AIR application with Times Reader and even an article skimmer utilizing some brilliant jQuery.

The challenges that we now face as developers and designers is developing for not only multiple devices but for different Rich Internet Applications as well.