[brak]

Good day all!

We are looking for brave souls to test a (fairly early alpha) version of ENC chart viewer for Mac (i386 only).

Please visit www.polarnavy.com to download. We need your feedback - the product is in its early stages and your opinion will make a difference.

Thanks!

[ginginsman]

There appears to be no address or system for giving feedback.

[georgelewisray]

Not willing to download a run a program out of the blue with no supporting information. Who, what, and why ......
Hope it is an honest navigational SW effort, then I will be eager to try it out.

[brak]

Feedback form is available directly on the web site (look for "feedback" menu). Or, you are welcome to provide it in this thread - it would make for a better discussion

[georgelewisray]

I see the feedback form on the 'polar-navy' website. However, since there is no information about the program or the people offering it, and the poster is brand new to the forum and has no track record and no public profile info, and provides no links to other works, it could just as easily be an executable that is up to no good. Way to anonymous for my tastes.

I look forward to finding out how wrong I am and apologizing for my suspicions.

[brak]

The answer about feedback form was for a previous poster.

I honestly don't know how to answer to your question properly. It came up previously on other forums. Frankly, there is absolutely nothing that can be placed on a website and in any way guarantee safety of application.

Hopefully, more daring souls would try the application and come back to share their experience. This is the only way to establish safety or reputation of a program, IMHO.

[ginginsman]

The questions about who you are are perfectly appropriate. If you can write a program like that, you can certainly manage to set up a secure feedback system.

Tell us more and you might get more back if you're legit.

[brak]

Website development is quite separate from application development, as you no doubt realize. At this point given limited resources application development receives the most attention and web site will likely stay at its current level of functionality for a while.

That said, we are getting some feedback. I certainly hope that some of those that tried the application will share their experience here at some point in the future.

[cyberhusky]

Hi tried the app for some minutes.
So I welcome the idea of such an application on the Mac.

So far I've noticed these missing features:

I installed it on my iMac 24" (Intel) OS X 10.5.6

- the About Menu doesn't work, window pops up and disappears at once
- in the menus the COMMAND Key isn't shown
- S63 ENC charts (those that do need a permission code) don't load
- I tried S57 ENC charts (the one that are free) of the Netherlands seaways: this time it worked, but loading all charts (many files does crash PolarView)
- I would like to have ZOOM IN / ZOOM OUT on the scrollball of my mouse
- the chart manager doesn't remember the last selection
- the info Window should be there from the start
- it would be interesting to have the name of the ENC chart displayed somewhere.

I think PolarView goes in the right direction. It's still beta but I think will get some more features.

Regards,

Manou

[brak]

Thanks for the reply

Some features are on the list, others (like S63 reading) require quite a bit of organizational work before getting off the ground.

I am very interested in a few of your specific comments:
1) It would be great to get a copy of free S57 charts for your area (Netherlands). The program is currently tested on the set of charts available to us (which is essentially a NOAA set and a few charts of other areas). This would also help in replicating and fixing the crash that you report.

2) When you mention that about dialog disappears right away - does it happen whether you select it using F1 key or from the top menu?

[brak]

To follow up - I was able to find current set of free Netherlands charts (at http://www.risserver.nl/\ENC\).

The crash was caused by a chart "Hollandsch Diep\1R5HD262.000" which has incorrect data. That said, a program should obviously never crash, no matter what kind of data it has to deal with - and a fix is implemented and will be included in the next release.

For the current version you can remove this cell and try again. I'd be very interested in your experience with these charts.

Thanks!

[cyberhusky]

To follow up - I was able to find current set of free Netherlands charts (at http://www.risserver.nl/\ENC\).

Yes that are the charts I did try. After teh crash i only did import the OSTERSCHELDE directory from that set. Whih works correctly.

The crash was caused by a chart "Hollandsch Diep\1R5HD262.000" which has incorrect data. That said, a program should obviously never crash, no matter what kind of data it has to deal with - and a fix is implemented and will be included in the next release.

Great to hear.

For the current version you can remove this cell and try again. I'd be very interested in your experience with these charts.

I will give it a try...

Thanks![/quote]

[cyberhusky]

Thanks for the reply


2) When you mention that about dialog disappears right away - does it happen whether you select it using F1 key or from the top menu?

From the menu, F1 only dims my screen on my Mac. Tried with SHIFT, Alt, CTRL and COMMAND key in any combination but no luck.

[cyberhusky]

For the current version you can remove this cell and try again. I'd be very interested in your experience with these charts.

Thanks!

If I leave out this cell, everything loads correctly.

Another feature I would like to see is the annotations of buoys or objects inside the charts instead of having to look them up in the info window [color:black][/color]

Regards,

Manou

[brak]

Yes, this was a bug - thanks for reporting! Will be fixed in the next version as well.

It appears that there are a few other issues with some of these charts, you might see them reflected in a view if you look, for example, at the chart for Haringvliet/1R5HV002.000. This is excellent test bed for some of our data sanity checking (which no doubt needs improvement ).

[ActiveCaptain]

OK, I tried it. It's a beginning. The display is pretty nice and the symbology is good. It's appears to be an OGR/GDAL-based S-57 viewer. So what's next? There's almost no user-interface and it doesn't really function as a chartplotter - no GPS support, etc.

What are your plans for it?

By the way, loading in the standard 1,000 US ENC's crashed it - perhaps some type of memory limitation?

[brak]

The program is tested with more charts than are available in the full NOAA set and memory use is generally not the issue.

There is likely a problem with one of the charts in your set (and we are not handling it very gracefully). In the last few days a few validation issues were fixed, but there may be more (or this may be one of the already reported issues, the release is not going to be updated with all the fixes for some time).

Would you mind letting me know what chart it was reading when it crashed? You should see the chart name and path in the progress dialog. It would also be great if you can send me an archive of the chart that is causing a crash.

Thanks!

[ActiveCaptain]

I checked my ENC root directory and you're right, there are more charts than just the NOAA ones. Some are proprietary and I can't give any additional information about them. It is highly likely that one of them is causing my problem. If I can narrow it down further, I'll write back about the specific problem.

What about the rest of my questions and these new ones?

1. What are your plans for this?

2. Is there going to be more of a user-interface?

3. Are you making it open source? If not, what is your target price?

4. Is there something special about it that will make it different, better, cheaper, etc. than MacENC, Coastal Explorer, MaxSea, Fugawi, etc?

5. You're clearly thinking about multiple platforms. Are there others? Linux, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android, Blackberry, J2me?

6. What is your background and how many people are working on this project?

[brak]

That's more questions than I currently have answers for

The objective is to improve the application (which is, of course, open ended). Whether it will be better and/or different from other ENC chart applications and whether it will cost anything or remain free is something that will be determined by users. At this point any decisions on these issues are entirely premature. Open sourcing is not currently in the plan, but anything can happen

A few objectives for this application (so far) included clean, readable chart display, on an assumption that, all the automation features of ENC software notwithstanding, from a POV of a sailor visual chart presentation is still the most important function of ENC product. As a consequence, keeping most screen "real estate" available for chart display is a design decision, necessitating minimalistic user interface. Crucial and common functions will be likely available through direct keyboard or mouse input, others (like for instance the Google maps link) are accessible through dialogs. There is no "toolbar" and, unless users indicate strong preference to have one, it will probably remain that way.

There are more features missing than anyone can count and that will probably be true for a while

Other platforms will come in time based on effort and user interest. Linux in particular works reasonably well in lab conditions. However, it presents a number of issues in distribution and potential user base is not as large - so it will likely be postponed until some later date.

[ActiveCaptain]

OK, makes sense.

What's the development environment that you're using to develop this with?

[ReeferJon]

Polar Navy looks interesting.. good rendering for an alpha release. When you get S63 reading working, let me know, as I have a load of UK charts in that format.

Keep up the good work.

[brak]

If my understanding of S63 key management is correct, a set of charts in S63 format is essentially encoded per product. Each product has to have it's own key (provided by IHO), and when you purchase S63 charts, you supply this key. This is how charts are "individually keyed"

So, even if/when we begin supporting S63 it is certainly possible that you won't be able to use these same charts.

[GPSNavX]

Chart distributors such as ChartWorld will provide multiple permits so the charts can be used for multiple installations. In order to support world wide S-57 ENC chart coverage an app will have to support the S-63 encryption. Only the US and a few other countries have unencrypted S-57 ENCs.

Does the PolarNavy ENC chart viewer support the S-57 update files (xxxx.001, xxxx.002,xxxx.00X)? What about the Catalog.031 which has links to files besides the S-57 data?

[brak]

Yes, pretty much the entire world standardized on S63. Incidentally (to touch on a point made previously), due to the IHO contract requirements open sourcing ENC application that supports S63 is not really legally possible.

We support cell updates automatically (though better support is needed and planned, as was proven by a recent user issue where outdated updates were found in a more recent cell directory). Catalog files are currently ignored for a number of technical reasons (as a matter of personal opinion, I think they have both benefits and drawbacks). That said, I was under impression that catalogs essentially list cells that are included in a given bundle.

[brak]

Well, since there is a bit of a lull in PolarView development (due to external dependency that takes a while) we just added GRIB file support. At this point the only GRIB data type supported is wind information.

We are looking for your feedback. In particular:
- Do you like the symbolization? If not - why not and what would you prefer?
- What other GRIB information types do you usually use? (It would be great if while answering this you provided a copy of your favorite GRIB file - we have access to a limited number of data sources).

Version 0.4 available for both Mac and Windows (not that anyone would care for the latter on this forum)