Introduction
I hope it's fairly obvious how to use the main features of this page, especially if you have discovered the little tool tips that pop up when you hold the mouse cursor over a feature. If not, hover your cursor over the GO BACK button above. If a tooltip doesn't appear, don't blame me, your browser isn't up to scratch.
Read on... (Clicking the little blue triangles will take you back to the top of the page) . The screenshot below shows how it should look in IE6 maximised. It may vary with your screen resolution, font settings etc and some details may be slightly different as these pages are constantly being tinkered with (improved, hopefully). This is 1024x768 32 bit in WinME on a laptop with small fonts selected. The proportions are different on my desktop PC so don't be surprised if what you have is different again. Note that if you insist on having your favourites or history displays open or have big Windows toolbars taking up valuable screenspace, you can't expect everything to fit neatly.

What's it all about?
Well, this started life as a latest uploads slideshow with a limited stock of recent images but I found that with a bit of tweaking I could offer our entire archive in reverse order of posting - and it's less work for me! So it's still a latest uploads show, but it's up to you how far back you want to go. You have a photograph on screen: this was recently posted to the Gatwick AvPhotos email list on Topica. "Recently" depends on how many are being posted, it might be yesterday,a week or a month ago depending on how busy everyone is and how long it takes me to update the website. To the right of the photo are details of the aircraft: the serial or registration number (Regn), the aircraft type, the manufacturer's serial number (msn), sometimes known as the construction number (c/n). The next column is the operator: aircraft owners these days are often leasing companies. Sometimes, to confuse things, the aircraft may be leased to one airline by another and remain in the first airline's colours. Often there are stickers indicating this, but not always. Half the time, you couldn't tell from a photograph anyway. And lately airlines have been rebranding their image, with Airtours becoming MyTravel, JMC (previously Flying Colours) likely to become Thomas Cook. So what is in this column tends to reflect what is painted on the aircraft, which is after all what distinguishes one photo from another when the plane is the same. Next come details of the date the currently selected photograph was taken and the date it was sent to the list. Then you get the photographer's name in the by-line, a ©opyright reminder and his/her e-mail address and website (if any). The last two are clickable links which take you right there.

The Slideshow
The button marked AutoSlide will set off a slideshow. By default the first slide is the most recently posted and you work back from there. First pick the number of slides to show in the little text input box beside it, which then counts down. The default is 20, but you can pick as many as you like. If you pick more than the total available in our archive the show will start again at the beginning when it reaches the oldest image. You could cycle around forever if you wanted to, (at last count it would take about 5 hours to cycle through all the images if you left them on screen for 5 seconds each!). Next choose how many seconds the picture is to stay on screen (after loading) in the next text input box. The default is 10 seconds. Then click AutoSlide to start the show. If you have connection problems or your PC has decided to download e-mail or update its virus definitions while you have the slide show running, things may appear to have ground to a halt. Well that's because they have! Not much you can do until you have a clear connection again and nothing I can do to prevent it. I have (I hope) squashed a buglet in the programming which allowed the details display to advance even though the images weren't yet loaded from the server. I'd appreciate it if you would report any odd behaviour with this feature, it's more than a bit complicated. The button marked Stop will, unsurprisingly, stop the show which continues to cycle until you click this button or leave the page. If you try to change the slide count and timing values while the show is running, it will stop. It should restart from the current position when you click AutoSlide.

Browse the photos
You can flip through the album with the Next ( > ), Previous ( < ), First ( << ) and Last ( >> ) buttons. They wrap, so going beyond the last gets you back to the first and going back past the first ends up with the last. Using these keys while the slideshow is running will stop the show. It should restart from the current position when you click AutoSlide.

Home, Help, Info etc
Oh come on, do I really have to tell you that Home gets you to the main home page, Help is what got you here in the first place and Info is just the usual "About" box? Other items on the menu bar take you to other pages of the Gatwick AvPhotos site.

Technical stuff
The whole thing relies on a Microsoft technology called data binding, featured in their Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and for which Internet Explorer versions 4 and above come equipped. Oddly, you need to use a scripting language like JavaScript to get the best out of it - so much for DHTML! IE4 and above come with a built-in database manager - you don't need to buy anything else to maintain simple databases if you know how to use it - and so all the processing is done on your PC, NOT on the server. You just download the data into memory once as a simple text file and IE does the rest with a bit of guidance from your friendly web-page writer. In the case of this page, you don't have to send a message to the server that you want to see the detailed data for the next slide and wait for it come back. Unfortunately you do have to wait for the image file to download! The alternative would be to download all the images before starting the show, which isn't practical considering 20 of them could amount to a megabyte. This way of doing things is something simple souls like me can upload to our websites without having to rely on ISPs and web-hosting companies to provide the technology. What's more it's free! The snag is it won't work with Netscape, older versions of IE or other browsers.

Now you've read that lot, click the triangle below to get back to the top of the page and then take the GO BACK link to return to the galleries.

Michael Hooker, Horley, 13 July 2005.