Maquarium: Aquarium Management for the Masses
For those of us who keep aquariums, we know that it involves weekly testings of various levels and daily dosages of assorted concoctions. Well, sooner or later it is just too much information to keep in a notebook. Luckily for us Mac users there is a solution to this problem and it is Maquarium from everyday software.
Maquarium is chock full of features built to keep the novice and even expert fish keepers at ease.
When you first open up the application it asks you for the tank’s name, size, type, and your preferred chemical levels. Once you click OK you are immersed in a very simplistic yet functional interface, which is complete with all the buttons you will need while using the application.
From there you have the freedom to create an organized library of the fish, plants, invertebrates, and coral that are housed with in your aquarium. The most interesting and powerful feature within Maquarium is its database of fish. All you need to do is enter the common name or the scientific name and click search. The application will look though its database and find what you are looking for and fill out the entire profile for that fish with accurate information.
Besides the livestock library feature, the single most useful feature is the conditions table. This lets you keep track of every aspect of your aquarium’s chemistry as well as look at trends that develop in your chemistry in the graph view.
Maquarium also includes an expenses and a notes section where you can keep track of all of your aquarium expenditures and leave notes for your self regarding the aquarium. In addition, Macquarium includes a schedule and a handful of useful calculators to round out this very useful tool for tank afishionados.
Plus Maquarium is built from the ground up in Cocoa, and so supports numerous OS X technologies such as animation, sheets, contextual menus, and help tips. It also has support for the X-10 framework for home automation which is accomplished through AppleScript.
So if you are a fish enthusiast, I definitely recommend that you give the free trial a go or pick up the full version of Maquarium for $24.
Very cool. I was just lamenting with someone recently that there is no good aquarium automation software for the Mac. I wonder what all you can actually automate using this program?
Interesting tool…I can’t imagine what people are doing through the home automation framework with this. Lights maybe? If someone is using it to feed their fish via home automation that would be really amazing.
I think for the most part people are using the automation for lights, topping off water lost due to evaporation, and maybe even the pumps.
Personally, I would love to setup an automated aquarium that I could monitor and control via the internet because the technology is there but its just too darn expensive.
@Matt Witmer: there are numerous devices that do this (Reefkeeper 2, Aquacontroller III, etc.) but they are expensive and they don’t have Mac-compatible software.
CORRECTION: the reefkeeper 2 is not controllable through the internet, but Aquacontroller is
@Tim: You can still automate the lights without the use of those devices using the X-10 framework which uses Mac compatible software, although I don’t think X-10 could monitor the other aspects of the tank such as pH. But you did remind me that I have a Jace-2(Commercial Automation Controller) which I may have to play around with to see what I can do with the aquarium.
would love to have an app that manages your pets vet records, upcoming shots etc etc that looks like this. i believe there is one program out there that i looked at but it is very windows looking.