Dr. jQuery-Cycle, or how I learned to stop using Keynote and love HTML

(originally from https://web.archive.org/web/20150422001009/http://ajcsystems.com/blog/blog/2012/10/08/dr-jquery-cycle-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-using-keynote-and-love-html/)

We have a number of fancy dashboards displaying on TVs here at $work, and some of them are implemented with Keynote to get the endless-cycling effect. This is lame because Keynote is very hard to use for this purpose (precise grid positioning, versioned changes, lots of other stuff).

I recently stumbled across the jQuery Cycle plugin while trying to improve this situation, and it rocks. It does everything we need for this purpose and then some.

The one adaptation I needed to make was to implement a few keyboard commands, to pause/resume the slideshow and go to the next or previous slide. Behold:

Also useful was the jQuery keycode cheatsheet.