Slideshow Your Holidays

With all these winter holidays everybody has something to share with everybody. It does not matter who it is as long as they can bear your hype about all the fun you've had. And if you wrap all the images into a slideshow and throw an iPhone or iPod Touch into the mix all the boasting simply becomes a display of professional skills.

For the slideshow to be a masterpiece you have to choose a tool that provides as many choices as possible with regard to transition effects, music and size of the resulting project so as to fit on Apple's fancy iPod Touch or iPhone.

Wondershare iPhone Slideshow is one piece of software that can help you brag about your fun season and create the file to prove it. Of course, the result is as professional as can be and can be loaded and viewed on iPhones and iPods. The current price of the application is $14.95 and you can test it for as long as you want with the only limitation that the final result will be watermarked.

It comes with an easy-to-use, sweet interface that displays all your work in an iPhone frame thus giving a preview of the output result. The main application window is broken into four sections all concerting to create your slideshow masterpiece. In the upper part there are the buttons for adding the elements of the slideshow but the starting command for assembling them as well. There isn't much use of the Photo & Video or Music buttons because the items can be added from the timelines in the lower part of the screen.

The iPhone frame is actually the preview window for the slideshow and comes with three control buttons – play, pause and stop. Unfortunately, there is no video navigation control available so you cannot skip to a specific part of the movie.

In the lower part of the interface there are the photo & video and music timelines, which let you introduce the desired files in the slideshow. A double click is sufficient to bring the file browser and go to the desired file. As you probably guessed, the slides can be either images or video files, or a combination of these linked by transition effects.

Wondershare iPhone Slideshow has no problem with the popular image types such as BMP, GIF, PNG or JPG. With video, although it has no trouble with the classic extensions (AVI and MPEG), it fails to load VOB files. A very important aspect has to be mentioned: you can trim down parts of the video file and mute the original video sound and replace it with a song of your own. The audio (MP3, WMA and WAV) can also be trimmed to fit the video duration and this can be achieved by simply selecting the part of the video you want to keep. The application will do the rest of the work.

In the case of images iPhone Slideshow offers a limited range of editing options. There is nothing complicated but you will be able to crop the picture, lay some text over it and customize it (size, color, style and transparency, shadow, halation), add a clipart element or another item stored on your computer (JPG, BMP, ICO, GIF, PNG, EMF or WMF), frame it (by default there are only six frames but you can download more resources) or apply a negative or black and white effect and adjust the brightness and contrast.

Once you've set the order of all the slides composing the show (you can arrange them in the timeline with single drag and drop moves) it is time you chose the transition effects to link them together. The application makes available a rich set of choices in this sense. There are over 100 effects to choose from split into four categories: Fade, Slide, Slide Extend and Advanced. The changeovers can be customized in terms of duration, rotation and division.

Users can pick out a different transition after each slide as a preview window displays how the next slide is introduced in the show. On top of the list of transition effects the software makes available motion effects for the slide itself. This list is not as extensive as the transition one but it still manages to provide 22 choices. Setting off the time duration is available in this case too.

With all the effects, slides, audio files and transitions in place, there is nothing left to do but proceed to creating the movie. If this was easy until now, the process will not get any tougher. The set of options allows for setting the resolution of the slideshow, thus preparing it for multiple rendering devices (128x96, 160x120, 176x144, 288x224, 320x240 and 480x32). Additionally, you can select the quality of the audio file included. For this there are only two options (44.1kHz and 22.05kHZ) and for the job to be well done I suggest you choose the biggest value. Sure, the file will be a bit larger, but the quality will not be affected.

We have to mention that while creating the MP4 file with Wondershare iPhone Slideshow the CPU usage almost went through the roof. But the job was done and the result proved to be a true chef d'oeuvre among slideshows.

On the downside, it happened for the software to crash unexpectedly when trying to load a file other than a slide. We noticed that iPhone Slideshow is capricious and crashed each time we tried to load a particular image file. Nothing special about it could give us an answer to the crashing effect it had on the application, but the truth is that whenever we tried to add that ICO file as a custom clipart the software would close unexpectedly.

iPhone Slideshow is one of the easiest to handle tools for the creation of slideshows. It targets iPhones and iPods as rendering devices and offers a great range of effects for the transitions. However, the app needs reviewing as there are several bugs that may draw the user away.

The Good

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