newbie!!

newbie!!

Hi all,
I'm new to jQuery. It looks very exciting. I just made my first site with CSS.  The gallery animation on the home page of this site is done in flash.  I'd like to try to make it with jQuery and a CSS sprite...or maybe XML. I want to do this because I'm thinking that I can get better image quality using jQuery.  Images importing into Flash, just never look right. But I want it to basically function the exact same way.That is---
1-to play automatically with same kind of transition
2-have a play/stop option
3- NOT loop
4-I also would like to have a preloading animation to play.

I'm looking around for widgets.  Can someone point me in the right direction?
Thanks

http://www.michaelmcdonalddesigns.com/