I used to build my carousels in flash, but i seemed a good challenge for me to build a nice looking carousel in jQuery. Of course the carousel should have the same functionality as a flash carousel. Thus said the carousel should get all the content from the html itself, include paging, the possibility for some text over the image and have nice transitions.

I searched the web for available plugins and the jQuery Cycle plugin seemed the best start. The only task left for me was finding a way to display text over the images and style the carousel. The result is astonishing and since the content is html it has a lot of advances over flash, SEO, accesibillity and much easier to implement for backend developers. However flash still has to advantage ( or disadvantage ) that it compiles your code which makes it less easy to copy it.

The result and code ( of the jQuery carousel ) can be found here