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MA is an amazing program that still holds me entranced to this day, however life seems to have planned other things for Jim and it seems extremely unlikely there will ever be any further major developments.
Flippers extension of MA is also a major achievement, however I think it gets its wow factor from providing a different perspective of the corals that adds to the illusion that it is solid 3D and not particularly from the background that I actually find a bit distracting. I wonder what it would look like with a blurry distant static view of other corals as a background, like a "tacky" wallpaper background on a real aquarium. It's a shame this wasn't able to be taken further as an experiment to see what was possible as an extension to an already existing program.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems like Flippers extension are like plugins to a main program that add functionality but can not do anything without that original program at its core. Consequently I don't understand the reluctance to encouraging those sort of extensions since they have the potential to garner additional or renewed interest in MA. Even if the extensions were free, they would be useless without purchasing MA, so the extensions could encourage more sales of MA. It should be understood that the extensions are not guaranteed to work in all situations but one can fall back to the already excellent MA and not lose anything, only potentially gain additional functionality.
Anyway, that's my amateur perspective as simply a member of the public who loves MA and would like to see some extensions too.
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