Making Lake Applets

Here's a quick tutorial on making those lovely lake applets that we see everywhere.
They are really not complicated and you can get different effects with the code if
you feel like experimenting. This tutorial, however, is going to focus on just the
basic lake applet.

To begin, you will need to get your web page backgrounds in place, as
well as your title or header. It is a good idea to create a folder on your
desktop, name it Lakes and then you can save the photo you are using,
your html page and the file below all in the same folder. :)

Download the lake.class file Here. This is what makes your water "ripple"
Put your lake class file in the folder with your other "stuff" on your desktop.

Open your html editor (the same thing you would use if you were putting
a counter or guestbook code on your page). This is the code you will
need to copy and paste into your page editor. Just highlight the code
by holding your left mouse button down and dragging it over the text,
right click/Copy, then right click/Paste into your editor.

<div align="center">
<applet code=lake width="463"
height="454">
<param name=image
value="cove.jpg">
</applet>
</div>
</body>
</html>

You will need to change the name of the file you are using as your photo,
as well as the size parameters as shown in red above. Using the picture
above on this page, the file name is cove.jpg. The actual size of the photo
was Width 463 and Height 304. As you will notice above, the height parameter
is 454. You HAVE to increase the height of your photo in the code above, as
the extra space is where your rippling water actually is. I hope I'm not confusing you.

Let's do a "for example". Say your photo was 345 wide by 275 high. I would put
345 in the width parameter, and about 365-385 in the height parameter. This can
vary depending on how much "rippling water" you want to display. The more you
add the more water will show. Save your page.
Now you just upload all the files in your folder to your web space (don't forget the
lake.class file!) and Voila! you've just created a lake applet.

View My Collection of Applets

Background by Ritva