To create a color fish, simply fill in the two color icons in the first column. Then, to appease your friends with black and white monitors, copy each color icon to the ‘Data’ and ‘Mask’ columns. (See the Copy and Paste instructions below.)
To create a black & white fish, first fill in the icons in the ‘Data’ column, then copy each into the ‘Mask’ column. The ‘mask’ will be filled in and framed to give your fish a white background and frame, which will help it to stand out against the desktop pattern.
To make your fish swim, make slight changes in the icons for the two frames. The sample fish area will show your fish swimming as it will on the desktop.
To Edit a Fish, select it from the list on the left. Select which icon you wish to edit. The enlarged icon can then be used to edit. When editing the color version of the fish, drawing occurs in the color selected from the color palette.
To copy from one icon to another, select the one you want to copy and click the ‘Copy’ button. Then select the icon you want to replace and hit the ‘Paste’ button. Note that when copying to a 'Mask' icon, the result is filled in and framed automatically, giving the Fish a solid white background and border. This generally gives the best results. When copying from a black & white icon to a color icon, the result will be in the color currently selected in the palette.
To change your fish colors, double click on the color in the color palette and choose a new color. All pixels in your fish with that color will automatically change to the new color. If you have the same color appearing twice in the palette, option-click on a pixel to select the color in the palette which corresponds to the pixel touched.
• The "Active" checkbox determines whether or not this species will be allowed to appear on the screen. Each time a new fish is created, it is selected from the pool of Active Fish Species.
• Each Fish has its own color palette, which can be changed by double-clicking on the colors.
• "Import" will allow you to open a file containing Fish Species and selectively bring them into your Fish! file.
• "Revert" will take the current Fish back to what it was when editing began. Changes to a Fish Species are made permanent when another Species is selected, when the dialog is closed or "Import" is selected.
• "Motion" will let you determine how your fish move, or make them stationary.
Some Useless Hints and Boring Details
When drawing the black & white version, all pixels corresponding to bits in the mask are erased, then the "data" is drawn over top of that. This makes it possible to put a white frame around the fish so that the grey desktop does not interfere with the edges of the fish. Color Fish are drawn transparently, which means that desktop bits show through white bits on the fish. So "white" isn't really white, it is transparent. These methods were chosen to give the best effects in the different environments. Because they are so different, some adjustments will have to be made after copying to or from the color format to get the best results.
Option-clicking on any of the icons will copy the current icon to the touched icon. If you hold down the option key while bringing up the editor on a Black & White machine, the color icon is shown.
