Aquarium desktop picture?
 

Hi all...Was wondering: I am a registered user of Marine Aquarium for OSX from way back. I have started occasionally using Backlight to use the saver as a moving desktop picture. Occasionally, however, it takes up too much CPU, and would like to know if it's possible to have a high-quality (1280 resolution at least) screenshot done of the saver. Unfortunately, the normal key combo of comm-shift-3 stops the screen saver, and every time I try one in full-screen mode with the stand-alone application, I get crazy lines going through the shot.

Again, I'm an owner of the product, I don't want to cheat anyone out of using the screensaver! I just like the way it looks, and would like to have a still to use as my desktop pic all of the time.

Any thoughts?

We've talked with Apple about this minimizing CPU utilization in future products. For now, to reduce CPU utilization:
Set shimmer to "off."
Limit the frames per second to 30.

Reducing the number of fish and turning off the sound and bubble column may help a little bit, depending on the hardware.

In order to evaluate what we'd need to do to meet user expectations...
What is your hardware?
How are you determining that MA is using too much CPU?
What would you consider to be an acceptable amount of CPU load for an desktop picture on your system?

Thanks for your time and your enthusiasm for Marine Aquarium.

Sorry, Jim, I should have been clearer! I don't really have any CPU problems with Marine Aquarium, per se. It's only when I run it using Backlight, a program that enables screensavers to run as your desktop background while you work. I would think running anything that uses Open GL or so much screen drawing as MA would obviously take up CPU if I used it as my desktop background.

It's just that when I ran it like that, I liked the colors and everything so much that I just wanted a screen shot of it to run as my desktop background when I'm not running backlight, such as when I'm doing CPU-heavy tasks like encoding or using Photoshop.

Thanks to the link posted above, I figured it out! I switched my resolution to 1600, then ran MA in a window and resized it to fill the screen, but not run full-screen. I snapped a shot of the window and sized it down in Photoshop. Voila!

Thanks for all your help everyone. And MA is without a doubt the best screensaver. I had someone over the other night who was walking past my computer and stopped and said: "That is amazing! What is that?"

Aquarium Desktop picture
 

You can accomplish the same feat without backlight via the terminal. To Run screensaver in background: open terminal and type in:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &



To End this, open process dock, find Screensaver engine, select it and choose quit.

I have a dual processor 1Ghz Mac with the NVidia 4 titanium video card, and it works fine. On lessor systems, this will slow everything else down. Check it out.

With version 2 you can limit the fps to a lower number in order to make CPU utilization more acceptable.

Re: Aquarium desktop picture?
 

Actually there is a solution that is perfect for you! SaverLab is a free program available on versiontracker that can put MaineAquarium on your desktop like a lot of other programs such as BackLite etc. However it has another GREAT feature that was made just for people like you! A pause button!!! So you can let the fish swim anytime you want and then if you want them to stop so you can use photoshop or watch a movie or whatever you just hit Apple-P and they become the normal still desktop picture that you were asking for. Hit Apple-P again and they come back to life without you missing one swish of a tail or a flip or a fin!