Remember Flash? Yuck.
A few years ago Steve Jobs decided that it was time to take a stand against Adobe and their proprietary software Flash. Steve turned a lot of heads and started a ton of heated debates when he flat out refused to support Flash in the iPhone. Some people thought it was only a matter of time before Apple “had” to support Flash because really there is no way that we will be able to produce the same animation effects with javascript/jQuery, etc. That turned out to be incorrect. Since Apple products were so popular website developers had to come up with different solutions for their animations. In my opinion Steve’s decision is a major reason jQuery and HTML5 has progressed so much in the last few years.

Revolution Slider
Fastforward a couple years… Introducing The Revolution Slider
I recently launched a responsive WordPress theme at ThemeForest. The theme has the WOW Slider built in but I decided to give an extra slider option for people purchasing the theme, and decided on The Revolution Slider. I had seen the slider around over the last few months but never had a chance to use it. Last weekend I started creating the for the theme homepage with the new slider built in, and all I can say is WOW. I can honestly say that I haven’t had as much fun with, or been blown away by the quality and experience of any plugin/slider/website building tool in…ever?? If you think I’m blowing smoke I dare you to try the WordPress plugin and disagree. The plugin has an almost “Flash like” experience of building your slides (except without the headaches). Add layers of text, images, or videos, then adjust animation, timing, etc.
Yup, it’s official… Flash is in the past.

Revolution Slider
What makes it so great?
- Pricing
- Responsive
- Video Support
- Flexibility / Customization Options
- Layers..Layers..Layers
- Touch Enabled
- Duplicate Existing Slides or Sliders Feature
The first thing I wondered when purchasing the plugin is how complicated creating the different layers would be, setting the timing of all the layers, etc. I remember the days of setting up timing in Flash and what a headache it was. Well with The Revolution Slider this was surprisingly simple. There are a ton of settings, allowing you to customize pretty much anything. Set different animations and timing for each slide, set different entering and leaving animations for each layer, it’s pretty unreal. The flexibility of the slider really allows you to create a “movie like” experience on your “slides”. The term “slider” doesn’t really seem like the right term for this in my opinion.