August 24, 2008 12:22
Now just calm down. I have nothing against AyeTides. And yes, I have an iPhone. I've been developing software for the Mac since 1986 and even have an Eddy award under my belt (you've got to go way back to even know what that is). In addition to that, my wife used to work for Apple and we have more 7-color Apple branded stuff than most Apple Stores have on display (the good 1990's stuff too).
Not to pile on but we've also been writing a series of articles on Mad Mariner all about using smartphones on boats. There have been 10 articles in the series so far with the final one being published tomorrow. You can view them all at:
http://www.madmariner.com/mobile_phones
The article from last week was all about the iPhone. In it, we mentioned AyeTides giving it one of the first wide exposures to the boating community. I probably provided more publicity for it than any other channel so far. In my quest to make sure the information in the article is up-to-date, I'm keeping track of new apps that show up for the iPhone that are boating-related. That's how I came across Tide Graph.
Yes, I made a mistake about how Tide Graph works. It wasn't very obvious to me that it needed an internet connection and it appeared like it didn't. Who would really want an network-required app like this? It makes no sense.
To go even further with this nonsense, I've added code to Tide Tool myself and I'm very familiar with it. I'm the one who fixed it when Palm moved to v5 of their OS. I'm also very familiar with XTide and the various ports of that code.
Mr. AugustH writes on his own web site that:
"I've written Mr. Tides so that the Macintosh can display tides. This program is based (roughly) on XTide 2.8 by Dave Flater." Perhaps I wrongly assumed that he also used this code and all of the tide/current station data from XTide as a part of AyeTides. It seems incredible that Mr. AugustH was able to put together so much of those harmonic coefficients by himself.
If all of this was developed outside the open source license of Dave Flater, great. I applaud the app and wish it the best of success. If it is stealing from the open source community, then it shouldn't be tolerated. In issues like this, I assume that it is all open and above board. The truth usually has a way of coming to the surface.
Not to pile on but we've also been writing a series of articles on Mad Mariner all about using smartphones on boats. There have been 10 articles in the series so far with the final one being published tomorrow. You can view them all at:
http://www.madmariner.com/mobile_phones
The article from last week was all about the iPhone. In it, we mentioned AyeTides giving it one of the first wide exposures to the boating community. I probably provided more publicity for it than any other channel so far. In my quest to make sure the information in the article is up-to-date, I'm keeping track of new apps that show up for the iPhone that are boating-related. That's how I came across Tide Graph.
Yes, I made a mistake about how Tide Graph works. It wasn't very obvious to me that it needed an internet connection and it appeared like it didn't. Who would really want an network-required app like this? It makes no sense.
To go even further with this nonsense, I've added code to Tide Tool myself and I'm very familiar with it. I'm the one who fixed it when Palm moved to v5 of their OS. I'm also very familiar with XTide and the various ports of that code.
Mr. AugustH writes on his own web site that:
"I've written Mr. Tides so that the Macintosh can display tides. This program is based (roughly) on XTide 2.8 by Dave Flater." Perhaps I wrongly assumed that he also used this code and all of the tide/current station data from XTide as a part of AyeTides. It seems incredible that Mr. AugustH was able to put together so much of those harmonic coefficients by himself.
If all of this was developed outside the open source license of Dave Flater, great. I applaud the app and wish it the best of success. If it is stealing from the open source community, then it shouldn't be tolerated. In issues like this, I assume that it is all open and above board. The truth usually has a way of coming to the surface.