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Aquarium Software


Sutto

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Hi Guys, I decided to stop by as I am doing a general rounds of a few aquarium forums tonight and I thought some people here may be interested in an aquarium related project. To state it simply the whole project (currently in planning stages) is called Open:Aquaria and is planned as an opensource aquaria application written mainly in Visual Basic 2005. Something along the same lines was started by a member of another forum a while ago but from simply looking it appears that program disintergrated (which sucked, what he had was great :lol:). At the moment I am looking for people interested with experience in Visual Basic 2005 (doesnt need to be extensive) or who are interested and believe they can play a key role. I am also requesting that you post any ideas which think should be included. So yeh, Im sorry i dont have much info here atm (bit tired lol) but if your interested in participating / have suggestions then post here. Thanks, -Sutto

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Open source means that the guts of the program (known as source code) is freely available for other developers to edit. It is also free to use and distribute :lol: Have you seen some of the online logbooks on the larger sites? I think any application designed to organise a fishroom should have provision for up to 100 tanks, and have the log results and graphing able to be emailed easily :lol:

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Sorry if it was a bit rushed ast night, I was half asleep when I typed that :) The basic purpose of the program will be to provide a general purpose all-in-one application with most of the tools an aquarist will need. For example; There could be a record keeping section of the program which enables you to enter what fish you have, where you brought, when they bred etc. It will be setup so that it can provide warnings if it thinks you need to do waterchanges, suggestions on general care etc. Things such as calculators will be built in to maximize speed. Put simply, An all round aquarium program designed to help making manage fish and finding more information about them easier. I really like Calla's ideas about making managing large fish rooms easier and the ability to do all that *shouldnt* be too hard to implement (I say shouldnt having never done it before).

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Good ideas are always needed when a project kicks off. Sounds like a good one Sutto, but why VB ? I know my views are warped, but I would think a web-based application would be better, but at the same time that would assume that everyone had internet access all the time. The possibilites are endless though : - tank details (for X tanks, don't limit yourself to 100) - fish details (ditto) - mating/birthing details - water test results - alarms for water changes, birth notices, "time to spawn again", etc. - hardware purchase record - fish sale record (including $0 for give aways) There's a lot there ! First choice is the hardest : language and database, but I see you're already discussing that on your project site, so a good start anyway :)

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Well, Although we have a fair way to go before we select language the advantages of VB.Net is that - A ) The tools available are great and make it easy to develop the application (SQL suppport and all). B ) VB.Net is Object Oriented making alot of things easier :) In relation to a web based app I was thinking about it last night and although I personally think that an online only app isnt for the project base (although I could be mistaken - I only think this because its your limited by where you can find a webserver. Settings up a web application isnt for everyone ;)). It is possible we could make a web based system to go along side it (Although thats possible over complicating it atm). -Sutto

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Sutto, don't worry I'm agreeing with you, but I think it would be easier to get a web app running than a client app with (guessing) ODBC support. Web App .... PHP (so it's Object Oriented anyway), running off mySQL database. Almost every good hoster supports that, and you could probably provide cheap hosting for that sort of thing anyway. The database wouldn't be overly large, but schema could be complex. You could possibly then create a local app that ran off a local copy of the database, and sync the two for people that aren't permanently online. But don't worry, I'm only offerring suggestions, not trying to flame you in any way - it sounds like you're on to a great idea.

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Sounds like a great idea! :) I do use an excel spreadsheet, where I keep track of my tanks, fish, breeding, acquisitions, sales/gifts, contact details. I also assess myself on a scale I created in that whether I am: a blackhole (ie. purchases of the species/type more than produced/given away/sold) or a fish keeper (ie. Purchases of the species/type less than produced/given away/sold) for individual species/type. I can tell you how many of what I have and easily identify what I need to breed next etc. You need to keep proper records when your tanks increase in number. Good luck with the project. One important note though. The more data entry points you have less functional the system will be!!! That's because there is so much time you'd want to spend entering data as opposed to feeding your fish, changing water etc. Initial enthusiasm one has will erode fairly quickly unless one wants to be primarily a virtual fish keeper ;) Cheers, Serkan

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fulltilt: thats an excellent idea, The ability to have a PHP version is very interesting (and Im sure quite do-able :)).

Serkan: I can see what you mean by data entry, Probably the only the bare basics will be required when adding a tank (E.G. Got Fish, Size etc) and then from there on people can add what they want :).

Also,

as of this morning the site address is now:

http://www.openaquaria.com/dev/forum/ :)

-Sutto

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I'm interested in getting involved although VB is the only language I can't stand programming in (but I can understand why you chose it). To go on from what Serkan said I think a main feature will be the ability to leave fields empty (to avoid overwhelming data input) and allow people ot customise what data fields are available. I'll check out the project site. Dean

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  • 2 weeks later...

Gah, Im sorry if anyones been able to access the site and has had problems - The server it was hosted on has been a real idiot lately. Lost a hdd, put a new one in and then the server install corrupted. Put simply Ive lost what posts we had.

Because of this i would just like to say that the address is actually now:

http://oa.sutto.net/forum/

the domain http://www.openaquaria.com should redirect to there soon :)

-Sutto

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