Marine Aquarium 2.6 for iPhone and iPad
 

If you go to the App Store in iTunes you can see we have just released Marine Aquarium 2.6 for the iPhone and iPad. This is the real thing.

Please let us know how you like it.

Marine Aquarium 2.6 Product Page in the iPhone App Store

Why... would you waste time re developing a program made obsolete by MA3? You squeeze a few pennies out of it but will annoy all your customers when they realize they bought an out of date program and MA3 is where it is at.

Just downloaded it to my iPhone. It runs great, and has most of the settings for Marine Aquarium 2.6 for PC/Mac. Impressive for $0.99!

Because Marine Aquarium 2.6 "fits" better on the iPhone than Marine Aquarium 3. And it's $0.99, which is a very good price for it.

Marine Aquarium 3 may not be possible on the iPhone because of its use of shaders and large screen width.

Maybe due to technical limitations they CAN'T produce 3.0 for the phone/pad/touch?

Yes, it will be a long time before the iPhone / iPad hardware is up to the requirements of MA3.

Marine Aquarium now graces my PC and my iPhone :)

Thanks for your support! :)

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your thoughts. I hope you are wrong about ticking people off. That wasn't the goal.

Jim

Just installed to my iPhone.

Runs very nicely and gui is ideal.

MA 3 Mac is available on the SereneScreen website generally, but they are having a problem at this particular moment with the website. :(

Yes, the SereneScreen website was hacked by evil-doers, and is down for repairs.

It appears to be back up and running as of this time.

Yes, it's fixed. We lost a day of sales, and two man-days of work for JimR and Edgar to fix it.

I'm curious as to the reasoning behind these statements. The iPhone 3Gs and iPad both contain the PowerVR SGX graphics chip, which contains support for most of modern graphics chip features, including:

Programmable graphics pipeline
Pixel shaders
Stencil buffers
Vertex buffer objects
Unified system and graphics memory (up to the entire 256MB RAM can be used for textures)
8 texture units

Seems more than capable to meet the modest requirements of MA3...

-Robert

Traditionally, the iPhone/iPad development environment has not allowed shaders, even if the hardware could handle them. Mike Babin can probably address the issue of whether this policy has changed.

The iPhone 3Gs and the iPad both support the OpenGL ES 2.0 framework, of which shaders are an integral part. There is actual Apple sample code in the iPhone reference library that builds an OpenGL ES 2.0 application that includes pixel shader code, and the xCode project template for an Open GL iPad application includes the skeleton for writing pixel shaders. I think it's safe to say that any restrictions Apple may have had against shaders has been lifted for the 3Gs and the iPad.

By the way, I hope my statements aren't taken as criticisms in any way. I love MA, and I'm just dying to see the 3.0 version on my iPad!

Why is the iPhone/iPad version of MA 2.6? We first started work on the iPhone version of MA back in December 2008. At that time, it was a quick proof-of-concept type project. Would it work? What would the performance be like? At that time, the current iPhone OS was 2.2, and the iPhone 3G was the current model. MA 3 for Windows was still in development, and we had not begun work on the Mac version of MA 3. We got the basic aquarium working with a few bugs, mostly acceptable performance, and a first cut at a rudimentary settings UI. Other projects took priority at that time.

In mid-summer 2009, we had some time open up to work on MA. At that point, MA 3 for Windows was essentially completed. We decided that MA 3 for Mac took priority and we worked on it first. After it was released, we took another look at MA for iPhone. We decided at that point (December 2009) to finish MA 2.6 for iPhone, rather than start over with MA 3 for iPhone. We wanted to deliver a version that could work on all iPhone/Touch models and support back to iPhone OS 2.2.1 (since many original Touch owners had not upgraded to the newer OS). MA 3 required shaders, which required OpenGL ES 2.0 and would limit it to working on the iPhone 3GS and equivalent Touch models (32/64GB). Additionally, the larger tank and improved background in MA 3 were not as visually compelling, in our judgement, on the iPhone screen.

We were nearly done with the iPhone version of MA 2.6 when Apple announced the iPad. We decided at that point to finish MA 2.6 as a universal app for iPhone and iPad. Adding the iPad support was surprisingly simple, although we did have to bump up the minimum required OS for the iPhone to 3.0 (Apple wouldn't allow us to submit a universal app where the iPhone version has a minimum requirement less than iPhone OS 3.0).

We may look into creating a version of MA 3 for iPhone/iPad in the future, although we have no plans to do so at this point. The larger screen on the iPad, in particular, would make this version more appealing. Shader support is present in OpenGL ES 2.0, so it should be possible. We'd have to see what kind of performance we could achieve, which may involve reducing the number of fish in the tank or other measures to reduce the load. There are other factors to consider like the state of the market for apps (the App Store, pricing, level of sales for MA 2.6, etc). We're not making any announcements or promises at this point.

I love it!!! MA3 is way better, but there's something about the over-saturated colours and over-sharpened contrast of MA2 that I've always missed and to have it on the iPhone is super cool. It's like having PacMan on the iPhone... I'm not going to play it all day on my supercomputer but having little bites of the coolest thing from 10 or 20 years ago in my pocket is really wonderful. I'm really glad you did it and that it turned out so great. It's even better than on the computer screen because you can zoom and pan in a way you never could which makes it feel more interactive; not as good as if you'd add actual interaction such as feeding and glass tapping but a really nice addition. And the price is fantastic... hopefully you'll get a million downloads in a month.

So far, I've averaged $20 per day from it.

:TU: Being that a lot of people get a share of each sale would this indicate a better than expected return / sales? And to be only partially nosy.. does the artist get the biggest piece of the pie?

Apple handles all sales, and keeps 30% for doing it. The rest is split among the developers, in this case Order N Development, Prolific, and myself. Arktis also gets a small percentage for a mass-mailing that they are supposed to do. 99 cents doesn't go very far when split so many ways.

Best 99 cents I've spent on my iPod Touch.

Sure it's only virtual fish "swimming" in a virtual aquarium, with a pan and zoom capability, but you know what - that's exactly what I expected and it is very good, in my opinion.

Would I prefer all the features, including any new ones, that are or will be in MA3? Of course I would. Wouldn't we all? If that ever happens, it will be most excellent, and I'll surely come up with another $.99.

But for now, good job to all that worked on this, and thank you very much.

:TU:

Well I guess you were super late to the party when it came to aquarium apps, so late that cheap foreign rippoffs of both MA2 and MA3 were on the iTunes store for a long time that just played a looping movie of your work. You're familiar with them aren't you? I'm sure a lot of your potential market was poisoned by those. Also there are now better fish apps that MA2 or even MA3 for the virtual fish enthusiast that you're competing with these days. You've inspired a whole new market that you're going to have to work harder and faster to stay ahead of. You don't have a problem with working faster and harder do you??? ;-]

Yes, that was our German distributor that did the looping movie versions. We took over thier MA 2.6 "slot" with this real 3D version.

Can you touch the fish and they react? :D

No.

But they do ignore you just like real ones!

:)

The iPad Marine Aquarium 2.6 is #8 on the paid iPad applications list, a couple days ago it was #13. Thanks to those of you buying it and helping us climb the ranks.

I bought 2 copies, one for my brother and one for his girlfriend. They both have iPhones and love them. They both really like the MA 2.6 app but admit that they wont use it often because it'll just be wearing down the battery. They don't have much need for a screensaver on their mobile phones. I was able to play with it a little bit and it looks really cool.

When docked, they should be able to play music while watching MA 2.6 on their iPhone (or touch or iPad) and charge the battery all at the same time.

In fact, I'm doing that right now on my iPod Touch.

(Listening to Eric Burden and War, "Nights in White Satin".)

:TU:

Marine Aquarium 2.6.1 for iPhone/iPad update now available in App Store.
 

http://bit.ly/cBWFUg

What's New in Version 2.6.1
• Allows you to control when your device sleeps while the aquarium is running
• Fish given a rating of zero stars will not be displayed, if possible
• Added Japanese localization

Also, you can now fill the tank with a single type of fish if you want. Just give it 5 stars, and the rest 0 stars. This was not possible before, as random fish would still be chosen automatically.

OK, that's it. As soon as they bring out the iPad v2, I'm going to get one!

Why wait, Wizwad -

buy MA 2.6 now.

You'll be able to tell people you have it.

Just don't tell them you can't run it!

:)

Heh. I have MA2.6 kicking around here somewhere - once I can track it down again! But it's for PC, not Mac. But that iPad is really growing on me, so once the next gen screen has been included, and potentially a port for external expansion, then I'll be right there at the front of the line!

I know what you mean, Wizwad.

I really enjoy my iPod touch, especially when I am near free WiFi or at home.

I'd prefer carrying around an iPad (or similar sized touch-screen Windows PC) over a notebook system right now, but with what I can do on the iPod Touch and carry it around easily in my pocket, I'm not really needing something larger.

Of course, "needing" and "wanting" aren't often the same thing, are they?

If you've not seen one of the iPads in person, you really haven't seen one. Just holding it in your hand, if you listen closely, you'll hear it say "take me home". When I go into an Apple store, I crank up my iPod with earbuds so I can't hear it!

:)

LOL - yes. The current iPad is trying to talk to me now, but I have my fingers in my ears. It makes typing a bit more interesting, though!

I did buy this, although it would have been nice to actually choose the fish, still that said it looks very good on my iphone!
John