malsup.com/jquery/cycle - Tricked Out SlideShow App

SlideShows have gotten so much techier and modern and cool—they're a far, far cry from those old vacation shots that your uncle Tom used to show you on a ripped white screen. Nowadays, slideshows may be easily tossed onto your blog, your social network profile, your fan site; however, not all slideshow apps are created equal, some simply leave you hankering for more—more special effects, more groovy fade-outs and zooms and mixes. The JQuery cycle plugin is for those who crave fancy accoutrements and fx. This lightweight plugin supports pause-on hover, transition effects such as shuffle (which mimics the shuffling of a deck of cards), zoom, fade, turndown, scrollup, and scroll right, auto-fit and auto-stop, as well as click triggers. Implementing JQuery requires some CSS knowledge—primary rules: containers and slides have fixed boxes, and every child element becomes a slide. It's a free download.

"The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a lightweight slideshow plugin. Its implementation is based on the InnerFade Plugin by Torsten Baldes, the Slideshow Plugin by Matt Oakes, and the jqShuffle Plugin by Benjamin Sterling. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and many transition effects. It also supports, but does not require, the Metadata Plugin and the Easing Plugin."

jQuery provides some rather spectacular eye candy. It gives you a wide variety of customizable options, which seem pretty easy to implement if you know what you're doing. With photos being the popular decorative and show and tell items that they are, new ways to showcase them are always welcome. Simply makes things look a lot better.

Will novices be able to use this? It's not as simple as other slideshow options, which means it may not work well with the mainstream crowd. More help/Q&A sections would be useful additions.