I recently ran across an application for Mac OS X that is simply called Fish. The idea behind it is very simple. It simulates an aquarium on your Mac in 3D. That in itself isn’t terribly new or exciting, but there are several twists to this app that make it different from other Aquarium type apps you’ve seen before.

First off, you can change the view. There are several different points of view that the virtual “camera” can be pointed to change what is presented. For example, you can focus the camera on a particular fish in your aquarium and it will follow it around.

Secondly, these fish need to be fed from time to time or they will die. You can set up your aquarium to “Auto Feed” if you like, or you can feed them by hand by clicking on the little fish food icon.

Lastly, and this is the really interesting part, is that the application is Bonojour/Rendezvous aware. What that means is that if there is another user on your network subnet that is also running Fish, the fish from their aquarium can swim into yours and vice versa. Pretty cool, huh?

Fish is freeware and can be downloaded by following this link. It runs on both 10.3 and 10.4 and it is even a Universal Binary.

–Pete