I recently had to modify an online slide show for a site I was working on and had the pleasure of working with a shareware program called Slide Show Pro.

This software has a Flash based (.swf file) player that interacts with a standard XML file and a folder of images to create a very classy looking player that can be easily modified by the user.

I liked it so much I went and purchased the Flash version yesterday for the reasonable price of $29. It was easy to purchase with my PayPal balance or you can use a credit card.

You install it into Flash and then it is available as a component from within Flash. You just drag an instance of the player onto the stage and size it how you want. There are dozens of options available to customize the player via a simple drop down menu interface and the changes show up live on the stage.

Making a folder of images interact with the player and the XML file is super easy and they have video help and instructions for the whole operation. You don't even have to re-size the images before making it because the player adjusts all the images to the size of player you set.

I really love this program. Please check out the site and try the demo if you want to play around without committing to the $29 price.

I have already used it today on a site I am designing and it saved me many hours that I would have spent setting up a gallery by hand.

If you try one yourself, give me a link to the player so we can check out your example.

So why do I use this shareware program called skEdit instead of Adobe Dreamweaver for my freelance web design?

This all goes back to about 3 months after I started at Hitchfinder.com. The other designers were using Dreamweaver as a text editor for HTML and CSS and I was too. In college I had 2 semesters on how to use Dreamweaver.

It's a great program, but at a certain point I got to the skill level that I no longer needed all the extra help Dreamweaver throws at you (most without your asking) like the design view, flash text, integration with Fireworks and so on.

So I decided to check out this little shareware program called skEdit, by stki Software. The programmer, Sean Kelly, is a young software engineer working at Apple, Inc. I guess that's where the "sk" in the name came from.

This program is made and designed for Mac ONLY. I use Macs, so I thought it would be a perfect fit.

Well, I really love this program. I have only opened and used Dreamweaver a few times in the past 2 years. I have not needed it. The only times I have used it has been when I had 2 clients that used Dreamweaver and I needed to use it in their office because they were familiar with that program.

So what does this program do that Dreamweaver does not? Wrong question.

It simplifies the design process by letting you focus more on the code. It actually does a number of the same things like code completion, auto closing brackets, snippets, design view (previews in browser, not in skEdit), search, syntax aware indenting, find and replace and autosave.

There are features I don't even use like edit files on remote server, HTML tidy, subversion integration and user scripts.

What I think are killer features are projects and the code navigator.

The projects let you tie a project to a local folder and you can have a number of different projects or sites open at the same time. That way you can copy and paste code from one site to another quickly and easily. Try having 2 index.html files from different sites open in Dreamweaver at the same time and feeling real confident you are copying and pasting the right pages. In skEdit you are sure because the files are open in different windows at the same time.

The code navigator is a pull down menu the CSS related codes on the page. If you open your CSS file, in one quick place you can quickly see all the rules by name that you have created. It makes jumping down to that CSS ID "center_column ul li" a very painless task.

This program just does what it needs to effectively and quickly and it is not a ram hog like Dreamweaver.

You have to try it to really get the feel of how it works and what it can do. There is a free 25 day demo, full online documentation and it's only $34.95 to purchase.

Sean is very good at getting back to you with requests and problem resolution and is a nice guy.

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