I have never, ever seen a reef aquarium with a bubble wand or large airstone in the tank anyway. And I've seen a LOT of tanks, at fish stores, shows, and public aquariums. It's a nice graphical touch for the screensaver, sure, but in my experience most reefkeepers consider it to be unnecessary and actually a little detrimental to the tank because it can really contribute to salt creep -- which can in turn have an effect on the salinity. (The more salt that gets "skimmed" out of the water by the bubbles, pushed onto the hood, sides, or other areas, the lower the specific gravity.) Plus, salt creep is just ugly and a pain to clean.
Having said that, I think the bubbles are a nice option to have in the screensaver. I turn the sound off, though. The reason a lot of reefers put small slits in standpipes, for instance, is to *reduce* the amount of gurgling sounds. Motor hums are also something to minimize as much as possible, which explains the existence of pumps like The Quiet One by Lifegard. And chillers are notorious for making a lot of noise (think: car radiator in the aquarium cabinet), so manufacturers have concentrated on new ways to chill the tank without being noisy. So, as far as which bubble sound would be best, I say whichever sound is the quietest and least annoying. Me, I just turn the gurgling sound off. I get enough of that from my REAL aquarium.
In reference to Jim's last post in this thread:
1. I've got about 10 computers around here, and the only way they all have of sharing data is the floppy drive. Whenever I make the slightest change in the Aquarium, I have to test it on all those different machines.
I'm telling you, man, network up all of the machines, create a central share point, and post the updates to that!
(10/100 network cards are about $15 a pop nowadays, and hubs are cheap too, as you probably know.)
2. I allow Key holders to use the Aquarium on all their machines. So they can download it at home, put it on a floppy and install it on their machine at work. I can't stand downloading something which won't quite fit on a floppy, then trying to figure out how to transfer it to another machine.
Everybody I know that owns a PC at home and uses a PC at work invariably has a much faster connection at work than at home (usually some sort of broadband, LAN, or in my case, a shared T3). I imagine certain other countries may be more limited, but is the plan to expand the features of the aquarium, or to always play to the lowest common denominator? I don't think you can do both. You are already up to around 680K; I would be surprised if you can get even a fifth of the way through adding the features from the long wishlist before you hit 1440K, no matter what sort of compression scheme you come up with. I am not dissing your considerable abilities, and I sure hope you prove me wrong -- but I think I'm looking at this realistically.
3. Coming from the Amiga community, I am amazed at the bloat that is so rampant in the PC world, so I just feel like leading a charge the other way, toward lean, mean programs. Why does it take 3 minutes instead of 3 seconds for my computer to boot up? The enormous amount of wasted bytes that it has to process can't be helping the situation.
Agreed. My first PC was an Apple II (back before IBM stole the "PC" acronym), back when people actually wrote entire programs in assembler (6502). I am always impressed by people that actually take the time to write tight code. Think how our computers would run if Microsloth decided to reduce the mega-bloat in Windows and Office. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that, at least after a few evolutions of this aquarium, the 1.44 MB floppy should dictate your creative ceiling. Even with tight code, it seems like a pretty tall order to cram all or even most of the proposed wishlist features into that amount of space. Again, I hope you prove me wrong on that one.