Using Aura For The Web?

Written By J.L. White

One thing I love about the PC is the AMOUNT of software that is available for it. That about does it for what I love! When I first got my PC, I was sooo ready to take on PhotoShop. I had heard many good things about it and wanted to find out for myself. Being reared on the Amiga, I had learned all the ins and outs of Deluxe Paint & Image FX so of course I thought I knew it all, well along comes PhotoShop and totally blows my mind on what they call a well thought out interface. If it had not been for the plugins, I don't think I would have ever used PhotoShop again.

Along comes Aura, the latest and greatest from Newtek. I can not tell you how much I LOVE this program! All the things I had learned in DPaint & Image FX could now be used on the PC. Kinda like DPaint on steroids. This is one cool program. Like any powerful program, there is a lot to learn, but even the keyboard short cuts were the same as DPaint, so it made it just that much easier for me to take control. BTW, did you know Aura started out as "TV Paint" on the Amiga?.

Since we do alot of our own Web pages, I wanted to see just how I could use Aura for Web graphics. I use it alot for video but WEB stuff can be a tad different. I started looking around on the web and found tons of tutorials for PhotoShop to do web graphics, so I started reading them and thought to myself, "Hey, I could do this in Aura!". Aura has a wonderful script language built in called George, which is very similar to ARexx on the Amiga. I started writing some scripts to help make my web graphics a bit easier to create.

Attached at the bottom of this article is the George script that I created to make buttons. Just unzip the file and copy it into George directory inside the Aura drawer on your system. This will work for both Intel & Dec Alpha versions. Below are some examples of what this script can do.

To use this script, just edit one of the entries in your George panel and select the Circle tool. Then highlight that line and go draw a circle on your image. What it does is use the ForeGround Color for the center and the Background color for the edge. It then creates a range of each color to create the button. For example, look at the first button in the example above. I used White for the Background and Purple for the Foreground. It also dithers the colors by adding a bit of noise. This is the default type of button and whatever size circle you draw it will always be the same. However, if you draw the button using the right mouse button instead, it will give you many more options.

The second button is similar to the first but has no second color. I clicked the right mouse button and left the Outside Border at the default but changed the Inside Border to the Maximum, then left the noise the same.

The third and fourth buttons are similar, the main difference is that the Outside Borders were both made smaller than the default and the Inside Border was made smaller on the third and larger on the fourth.

The only problem I have with Aura right now is the way it saves jpegs and gifs. The image above is a gif file which is fine, but try and save it with a drop shadow and a transparent background and it loses control. Also the jpeg does not come out as clean as it should. I know these are things that will get worked out, but for now save them out as 24 bit targas and load them into another package to save them out as gifs and jpegs. (Hey you spent all that money on PhotoShop, now you have a reason to use it :)

Experiment around and see what you can come up with. If you like this article, let me know and I can give some more examples on how to use Aura for Web stuff. Notice our new FlightWave Logo, with the cut in look, I did that with one of the new scripts in AuraFX Volume II.

Till next time...

Click Here To Download WebBut.Zip

To contact Jeff White you can E-Mail him at jeff@vionline.com