# How to open Indoor Fins

Indoor Fins is a fish aquarium that lives on your desktop. You start with one fish, Sardini. Wild fish swim in
now and then, and every one you catch joins your school. Thanks for trying it.

The download is not signed yet, so your computer will ask once whether you trust it. That is normal for
a new app from a small team. It takes about a minute.

## Windows

1. **Unzip it.** Right-click the zip, choose Extract All, then Extract. Do not run it from inside the
   zip.
2. **Open indoor-fins.exe** in the new folder (double-click it).
3. **If you see "Windows protected your PC"** (Microsoft Defender SmartScreen), click **More info**,
   then **Run anyway**. You only do this the first time.
4. A window opens with an aquarium in it. Fish swim about, and they swim away from your pointer.
   No black console window opens beside it. If you open Indoor Fins again while it is running, a small box says
   so; the first one carries on.

### Using it

- The first three wild fish swim in one at a time and never get away. After that one comes about once a
  minute, up to three at once; bank mode holds them off screen. A visitor you leave alone swims off after a few minutes.
- **Hover over a visitor** and it frosts over. Some species break free and dart off: keep the pointer
  on it through the dart and the frost keeps building. Lose it and the frost drains, and it can break
  free again. Once it is frosted solid, it is yours. **Click it** for a burst of frost. Each new species
  goes in your collection and joins your school, one fish each.
- Indoor Fins starts floating over your desktop, see-through, and your clicks go to your apps. To open the
  menu, hover the bottom-right corner: a cog fades in there, and after about 1.2 seconds the menu opens.
  Close it and you are back to floating, with clicks passing through. The **A** key works too. You never need to click: hover over any button to
  press it.
- The menu has two tabs. **Settings** has the switches you need most under **General**: make the window see-through, float it
  above your other windows, and let your clicks pass through, so the fish swim over your work. The ×
  at the menu's top right closes it. **Collection** shows what you have caught, and its themes. Under Settings, **Visitors** has the aquarium stepper that picks what swims (all you have caught, a
  theme, or the demo school of the five original species) and bank mode (visitors wait off screen, up to 8, and arrive together). **Look** sets how
  solid the fish are, and **Sardini** holds his tips.
- Hover over a menu control to press it, no click needed.
- Sardini offers a short tour the first time you open Indoor Fins. Click him any time for his guide.
- **M** turns the slow-motion follow on and off.

### If you get stuck

Indoor Fins has a fish icon by the clock, at the right end of the taskbar (click the small up arrow there
if you do not see it). **Right-click the Indoor Fins fish icon** for a short menu you can reach whatever the Indoor Fins window is doing:

- **Open menu** opens the Indoor Fins menu. If clicks pass through, the menu still takes the clicks on it,
  and everywhere else they still go to your other apps.
- **Clicks pass through**, **Float on top** and **See-through tank** are the same switches as on the
  menu's General tab. A tick shows which are on. Click one to turn it on or off.
- **Bring to front** brings the Indoor Fins window up, and moves it back onto your main screen if it went
  off the edge.
- **Quit Indoor Fins** closes it.

Or press **Shift + Esc** (hold Shift, tap Esc) from any program and the clicks come back. You can pick
a different key in the settings, next to the switch.

### Quitting

Press **Esc** (it first clears a selected fish and closes the settings, so press it again), or press
**Alt + F4**, or click the close button at the top of the window, or right-click the Indoor Fins fish icon
by the clock and choose **Quit Indoor Fins**.

### Where it keeps your things

Indoor Fins keeps a few small files in `%APPDATA%\indoor-fins`, among them `settings` (your switches) and
`collection` (what you have caught). To open the folder, press the Windows key and R, type `%APPDATA%\indoor-fins`
and press Enter. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you send a report from the feedback form (NOTICE-TESTERS.txt
says what a report holds). Delete the folder to start again as new.

### If something is wrong

Tell Merrick what you saw and what your PC is (Windows version, and whether it is a laptop). A screenshot
helps.

