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Old 04-01-2010, 03:27 PM   #1
JimO'Connor
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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
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Old 04-01-2010, 08:49 PM   #2
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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 You squeeze a few pennies out of it but will annoy all your customers when they realize they bought an out of date program and MA3 is where it is at.
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Old 04-01-2010, 08:57 PM   #3
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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!
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Old 04-01-2010, 08:57 PM   #4
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Originally posted by Ralph:
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 You squeeze a few pennies out of it but will annoy all your customers when they realize they bought an out of date program and MA3 is where it is at.  
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.
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Old 04-01-2010, 08:58 PM   #5
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Maybe due to technical limitations they CAN'T produce 3.0 for the phone/pad/touch?
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Old 04-01-2010, 10:18 PM   #6
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Yes, it will be a long time before the iPhone / iPad hardware is up to the requirements of MA3.
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Old 04-02-2010, 04:59 AM   #7
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Marine Aquarium now graces my PC and my iPhone

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Old 04-02-2010, 12:14 PM   #8
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Thanks for your support!
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Old 04-02-2010, 12:42 PM   #9
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Originally posted by Ralph:
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.  
Hi Ralph,

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

Jim
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Old 04-06-2010, 08:22 AM   #10
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Just installed to my iPhone.

Runs very nicely and gui is ideal.
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Old 04-08-2010, 12:35 PM   #11
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Very cool! Any word on Prolific and when we can purchase Marine Aquarium 3 for Mac?
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Old 04-08-2010, 12:37 PM   #12
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MA 3 Mac is available on the SereneScreen website generally, but they are having a problem at this particular moment with the website.
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Old 04-08-2010, 01:06 PM   #13
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Yes, the SereneScreen website was hacked by evil-doers, and is down for repairs.
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Old 04-09-2010, 10:00 AM   #14
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It appears to be back up and running as of this time.
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Old 04-09-2010, 10:21 AM   #15
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Yes, it's fixed. We lost a day of sales, and two man-days of work for JimR and Edgar to fix it.
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Old 04-15-2010, 10:40 PM   #16
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Originally posted by feldon34:
Marine Aquarium 3 may not be possible on the iPhone because of its use of shaders and large screen width.  
Originally posted by Jim Sachs:
Yes, it will be a long time before the iPhone / iPad hardware is up to the requirements of MA3.  
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
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Old 04-16-2010, 09:21 AM   #17
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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.
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Old 04-16-2010, 10:51 AM   #18
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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!
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Old 04-16-2010, 02:03 PM   #19
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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.
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Old 04-18-2010, 09:13 AM   #20
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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.
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