What is the jClicker?
-- Alan Levine
The jClicker is a template, a collection of pre-built HTML, JavaScript code and image files, that allow you to create a web-based slide show from any collection of image files. The whole point was to provide a way for people to create these kinds of well organized slide shows without having to know any HTML or programming language.
I created this first in 1998 to use mainly to host collection of photos from events sponsored by the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction, but has been made freely available to anyone. Over the years, features were added to allow pre-loading of images, self-running slide shows, dynamic re-sizing of images, control over layout via Cascading Style Sheets, and more.
But rather than going on and on about the jCLicker, let's look at it in more detail.
We will take a quick tour by looking at the basic 4 slide-show template that comes with the jClicker. The photos are ones I have taken from various trips inside the Grand Canyon. A jClicker slide show opens with a title screen, and the author's title and credits are automatically generated, along with a count indicating the number of images in this slide show. If you'd like, open this up in your own web browser to explore along with us (the link will open the slide show in a new browser window).
The jClicker opening screen.
The bottom grey bar is the control panel. Buttons allow forward and backward steps through the slide show. Let's say we click the right arrow button to see the first image...
A jClicker slide screen.
Advancing to a new slide instructs the jClicker to load a new image and to write the caption associated with that image. As an image loads, the indicator in the bottom of the screen blinks and indicates the status of the image loading. In the background, the jClicker is also pre-loading the next image in the slide show, so over a slower internet connection, there is less perceived waiting time.
We can use the drop down menu to jump to any slide in the show. This is useful for large slide shows, as there is no limit to how many images you can out in a jClicker slide show.
Using the jClicker navigation to jump from the first to the fourth image in this slide show.
The image resize buttons on the right side allow you to increase or decrease the size of any displayed image (the quality of images will decrease as you zoom in on images). For example, below we are zooming in on the image to get a closer look at the feature known as "Zoraster Temple"
Zooming in on a part of an image using the "resize" buttons
Using the jClicker is very intuitive, but we include an optional pop-up window that provides an illustrated overview of what all the jClicker buttons do:
Getting help from the jClicker
These are some of the features you will see in any jClicker slide show. But for a better sense of what it can do, the next section will show some different examples of jClicker slide shows.
