ΓÇ£Fish!ΓÇ¥ converts the ordinary, dull and monotonous desktop background on a Macintosh II into an animated display of fish swimming calmly behind your application windows. Like real fish, Fish! will not interfere with your work, will not make noise, or messes in the office and will provide you with a relaxing display to help relieve the occasional brain cramp. Unlike real fish, they do not need to be fed, do not need to have their tank cleaned, and can be edited to individual taste.
To install Fish!, copy it into your system folder and reboot. To remove Fish!, remove the file from your system folder and (you guessed it) reboot. Using the Control Panel, you may select the Fish! icon and change the number of fish, edit existing fish or import fish from other files. For best results, be sure to reboot with Fish! in your system folder before bringing up the Fish! panel of the Control Panel. Fish will run on any Macintosh II with a color or gray scale monitor. Multiple monitors are not supported. System 6.0 or later is required to use the Fish Editor (the ΓÇ£EditΓÇ¥ button will be dimmed otherwise). System 6.0 is also recommended for Fish! itself.
Since Fish has been carefully designed to run ΓÇ£behind the scenesΓÇ¥ it should not interfere with your applicationΓÇÖs windows, nor should it slow down the operation of an application. While Fish! has been tested with a variety of applications, there may be some programs that donΓÇÖt like Fish swimming around on the desktop, so exercise caution when using Fish around applications for the first time. Fish does consume an amount of memory depending on the selected screen depth at boot time. This can be quite significant for a 256 (or more) color monitor, or in tight memory situations. Changing the screen depth after booting will not change the amount of memory used, and will cause fish to behave with less charm and beauty than usual. The Fish will appear at their fishly best if the DeskTop pattern is set from the Control Panel while your monitor is in 4 or more colors (or shades gray); even if you prefer to stick with the default grey pattern, reselect it with your monitor showing more than two colors/shades of grey.
To change the number of fish that will appear on your screen, merely change the number shown in the Fish! panel. The number must be between 0 and 99, inclusive. Setting the number of fish to zero will eliminate the fish from your screen, but will not free up the memory used by installing fish.
The Fish Editor…
To invoke the Fish Editor, hit the ΓÇ£Edit FishΓÇ¥ button in the Fish! portion of the Control Panel. You will be presented with a scrollable list of all fish species currently stored in the Fish! file. Each species consists of two color images which are displayed alternately to animate the fish as it moves across the screen. To edit an existing fish, select it, use the color palette to select a color and draw into the magnified images of the two color fish images. Use the ΓÇ£>> Copy >>ΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£<< Copy <<ΓÇ¥ buttons to copy one color image to the other. The changes you make to the fish will become permanent when you change the selection in the fish list, create, duplicate or import fish or quit the editor. Until then, you may ΓÇ£RevertΓÇ¥ to the last saved state of the current fish.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The Fish you create are stored in the Fish! file itself, throwing it away, or replacing it, will irrevocably destroy any fish species therein contained. Use the ΓÇ£ImportΓÇ¥ function described below to transfer fish to the current Fish! file.
Once a ΓÇ£fish speciesΓÇ¥ has been stored in the Fish! file, it may be either ΓÇ£ActiveΓÇ¥ or ΓÇ£Inactive.ΓÇ¥ An inactive species of fish is stored but not used to spawn fish. The fish that appear on your screen will be drawn from the current pool of active fish according to natural selection. To change the active status of a fish species, open up the editor (through the Control Panel), select it from the list, and set the ΓÇ£ActiveΓÇ¥ checkbox appropriately. You may have only 10 active species at a time, any others will be ignored.
New (blank) species may be created with the ΓÇ£NewΓÇ¥ button. An existing species may be duplicated by selecting it and hitting the ΓÇ£CopyΓÇ¥ button. To delete a species select it and hit ΓÇ£Delete.ΓÇ¥ To import fish from another Fish! file, hit the ΓÇ£ImportΓÇ¥ button and select the file in the usual manner. If the file you select contains fish, you will be presented with a list of the species You may then select the any of the species by clicking, option-clicking and command-clicking the list.
The colors that appear in the color palette may be changed by double clicking on a color. The leftmost colors, black and white (not actually colors to people who get technical about such things), canΓÇÖt be changed. Each fish species has its own color palette, so you can use different colors with different fish. Changing a color in the palette will change the pixels in the color image drawn with that color. To change the color of the gridlines on the magnified color images, select a color from the palette and Command-Click on either of the images. To minimize interference with running applications, Fish! will not alter the color environment, so the colors you pick from the palette will be stored as you picked them, but will be displayed in the closest color currently available. This also means that if the color environment is changed by another program, the fish will be displayed in the new colors.
Teaching Your Fish Tricks
To keep the fish from loading at start-up time, hold the mouse button down. Changing the depth of your monitor will usually cause fish to make the desktop an unpleasant color. If you need to change the monitor depth temporarily and donΓÇÖt like the resulting desktop, set the number of fish to zero. This disables the fish drawing routines and refreshes the desktop. There have been rumours that it is possible to teach a fish to swim backwards, but the trick has been lost somewhere deep in the code.
Disclaimer, datclaimer, …
While this product has been carefully tested by a team of Bogus Beta testers, Bogus Software does not take any responsibility for any problems, whether real or imagined, caused directly, indirectly, or merely blamed on, ΓÇ£Fish!.ΓÇ¥ The algorithms and heuristics used to display the fish have been carefully designed and optimized for fish-like patterns and Bogus Software takes no responsibility for unpleasant displays created by trying to display objects other than fish.
Fish! may be enjoyed and shared freely or distributed for a nominal fee to cover the cost of building and maintaining a library of such programs by non-profit organizations (such as user groups). All other uses of the program must first be granted approval by the Bogus Board of Directors.
Feel free to send us your comments, fish, fish-related items, or other donations to help further our cause and help us realize our goal to put a fish on every disktop.
