Airtight Interactive's Simpleviewer

I first saw Airtight Interactive's Simpleviewer on a friend's website (see Meredith Brickell's great art pottery) and was struck by its elegant simplicity. Its image navigation is intuitive, the images fade in nicely and the background and frames can be as unobtrusive as you want.  Most of all, it's pretty simple to install and free.  (There is a more customizable deluxe version which costs $45.)  

At the time I was taking an introductory JavaScript class and was struggling to customize some code (lifted straight from the book) for image viewing.  Little did I know that Simpleviewer was so easy to download, setup and customize.  The directions are clear, even for a web-building novice, and once I had it up and running my site easily jumped to the next level on the "looks pro" scale.

I did hit one snag involving Macs only, but Simpleviewer's online forum proved very useful.  The author, Felix Turner, answered my question quickly and pointed me to the fix, and several other users answered as well.  Airtight Interactive also offers a few other very smooth looking, free image players.