Software for Slideshow Presentations

Nor sure what you mean by "better" since you didn't say what you
value but I'll tell you a little about what I have used.

PowerPoint and Keynote are the standards, of course, and both work fine.

PowerPoint is not great software but usually works and in business,
it's more or less the "standard." If you plan to send the
presentation to others to use, it's probably the one.

Keynote makes much prettier shows (it's what Gore used in "An
Inconvenient Truth").

But it sounds like you want something that runs more or less
automatically and plays many slides. Not clear if you want text
slides, text on photos or what.

Flash is a possibility and has the advantage of playing in most
browsers from a local file or from the web. And it has great creative
possibilities. Converting from PowerPoint or Keynote to Flash is
pretty hard, though. We did that for a production I did very recently.

You can use iPhoto to do a slide show and play it from iPhoto. You
can play music as the slides play but control of the audio is limited.

You can output as a QuickTime movie. Quality may not be as good as
playing directly from iPhoto since it does video compression.

You can post your photos to Picasa or flickr or .mac and play them as
a slideshow. Advantage: It's coming from the web and available on any
machine. Easy to share.

To integrate your music, GarageBand is quite powerful and gives you
great control of the audio.

To make a DVD, the iLife suite does quite well.

My experience with slideshows is that Fotomagico Pro is the way to go. The others were too much work to get similar or inferior results. I have used iPhoto, iMovie 08, Fotomagico Express, and it seems I've tried others but they've been more than a couple years ago.

When projecting from a Mac, you can create a "Player" application that includes all the photos, music and transitions. If you will be playing from another computer, or you want a more portable version, you can export an H.264 version (selecting the best settings for your needs requires some experimentation). That is how I prefer to play it, over the "Player" app, as it allows me to use any player I like (at least on a Mac) and I can start and stop at will.

A good digital projector with a digital signal from the computer (does the Dell offer a DVI output?) is very important, as are good speakers to get a lush sound (nothing worse than a nice looking show with AM quality sound, except for an AM quality slideshow and sound).

It is really great after a moving show to have folks come up and express amazement at the skills it must take to create such an event. It is awesome to have the tools that allow the creativity to flow uninterrupted.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure it'd look better projected from a MacBook Pro than a Dell. ::grin::

Good luck. Joel.

Is this just a slideshow that plays back without any user interaction. If so just create a quicktime file using any program that will create a slideshow. I use Photo to Movie. Then Using Toast create a autoplay DVD that will run in a dvd player or laptop.