JayDax Computer Information Centre

About this page
Back in 1997, when Dax and I first started talking on Internet we had discovered Java Lake applets; sheets of rippling water in a picture; and I set out to find out how they were done.

Being me, I wasn't content to start out with something simple, and decided to produce an applet using a very pretty picture Dax had found on the Web.

We reversed the picture, cropped it and tweaked it a little in PaintShop Pro (version 4 at the time) to make it 'just right'. I produced the necessary images for the applet while Dax found a suitable midi.

We wrote the poetry line by line in ICQ. Dax wrote the first line, I the second and so on. We then went through it line by line making suggestions until we got the final version. We thought it reflected well our mood at the time and the result appeared on our first joint website.

A few months later we found the painting was by Thomas Kinkade and wrote to him to check that it was ok to use it. He must have liked the effect because he replied, granting us permission to use any of his pictures in our applet effects.

'Serenity' proved very popular and it's poem - it's been published in an anthology and, if plagarism is the best form of compliment, then we've been complemented several times.

Alas, the web changes. Browsers decided that Java applets were too much of a security risk and became unsupported. It is possible to emulate them using HTML5 and Javascript but they are a real pain to produce now. So here's the modern replacement. Gemini animated the origional picture for us and here it is as an mp4 video.

The music is a composition by Enya, 'Watermark' played here as a midi file.