The hardware for such a product is about the easiest thing to get together. At least for a one-off. It's a little harder if you want to design something from scratch for mass production. But in all cases, the biggest development costs and difficulties will be in the software. That's where such a device lives or dies and what will eventually make all the difference to the consumer/user.

Recognizing this and also recognizing that there were no pre-made programs to do the while thing very wel, I decided to keep it as simple as I knew how.

I made a frame for my brother this past spring using an old Mac notebook. The slideshow is run using its screen saver and nothing more. The screen saver does zooming/panning and cross-fading (Ken Burns effect) which generally looks a lot better than commercial products. The frame was purchased at Ikea and the case to hold the computer parts was made by myself - pretty straight forward and simple design/implementation.

I took photos of the whole process but have yet to write anything up. Like creating your own software for such a product, that can be the most time consuming and difficult part.

In the end I spent more than I could have bought one for. But it ended with a 12" screen, better transitions, two gigabytes of internal flash storage, an additional 30GB of HD space that holds nothing more than the OS, WiFi, the ability to turn itself on/off on a schedule and of course the satisfaction of knowing I did it myself. And it means a lot more to the people I gave it to because of that as well.

Setting it up with dynamic DNS service one could share its resources and upload to it from the internet. Or even access it with Apple Remote Desktop or free VNC.