Fishy Review: Who Manages The Fish In Your Tank?

Encore Review: I’m on record as being against pets. They’re a nuisance, painful to take care of, don’t provide much to their owners, are messy, and eventually die.

So why do I like this Mac application and what good is it to a non-pet lover pet owner?

As a little girl I was bitten by dogs a couple of times, clawed by cats, and chased by neighborhood squirrels. Honest. It wasn’t fun.

Is it any wonder that the only pets I truly love and care about are a dozen stuffed animals in my family room? I like them stuffed.

Trust me, the maintenance level of stuffed pets is as low as you can get. I vacuum each pet once a year.

A close friend bought me a small aquarium a couple of years ago, and two goldfish to help populate the waters.

I’m convinced the fish were gay, as the only population increase came when I bought additional fish. I ate fish sticks in front of them just to show what would happen if they didn’t reproduce.

They called my bluff. Additional fish became a regular occurence as my frequent travels didn’t seem to sit well with fish who needed food each day.

Fish funerals were a regular occurence, too. At least I didn’t have to wear black.

I haven’t fixed my problem with feeding the fish in my tank (true fish lovers call it an aquarium, but it’s really just a tank of water).

As long as I travel, and it’s often, pets that need me won’t stay pets too long.

At least the fish can’t leave the house and run away.

My next door neighbor is also a Mac user, so we share some common interests. One of them is fish.

She loves fish as pets rather than deep fat fried, as in catfish, which is my preference. She has an aquarium. I have a tank with fish.

One day early this year I came across Maquarium. It’s not a screen saver aquarium. That would be the perfect pet situation for me.

Maquarium is aquarium management software; an application that runs on your Mac and lets you manage an aquarium.

And, I assume, fish tanks.

If you’re a novice fish lover and aquarium owner, you’ll love the approach that Maquarium takes to managing your fish tank aquariuim.

You can chart and track chemicals, schedule tasks, keep notes on each aquarium, and probably each fish, and manage inventory. How?

It’s all database driven. The built-in database holds the information that lets you maintain the “delicate needs of each fish, plant, coral, and invertebrate in the tank.”

I bought Maquarium for my neighbor on the condition that she put my fish tank aquarium into her database and manage my fish pets while I was gone.

Maquarium is actually quite interesting all by itself. You can schedule feedings and cleanings, but only for the fish, not yourself. I’d pay for self-feeding, self-tank-cleaning fish.

Not surprisingly, there’s an expense tracking component which lets you create custom categories for expenses; month, year, etc.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that aquarium is a very expensive term for fish tank.

Assuming your tank is large enough and sufficiently complex, you may also track tank aquarium conditions, such as CO2 and other chemicals.

As you’d expect with any decent Mac application with a database, this one has a graphic function so you can track features and results over a period of time.

That’s when I first learned that the term Flat Line could also apply to pet fish.

Maquarium is not expensive, runs on both PPC and Intel Macs, and works as advertised for $24. Getting your neighbor to use it and keep track of your fish may cost you extra.