EDITOR'S NOTE: The End Of The Series

The arsenal of advanced electronic tools now available to any boater armed with a laptop and electronic charting software might have seemed downright futuristic just a few years ago.

Want to scan and geo-reference paper charts of Croatia to create your own digital chart files? How about displaying a small window in the corner of your screen to stream video from your engine room? Or creating custom bathymetric charts with your own vessel's soundings? Or displaying the current location of your buddy's boat on your chart display?

All of these things – and many more – are possible with the electronic charting packages currently on the shelf of your local marine store. Sharp competition in a crowded software market and steady advances in the power of the average computer have combined to produce software with enough features to indulge even the most tech-savvy boater.

The real challenge is determining what you need from your e-charting package – in other words, what exactly do you want it to do?

In the general software industry, most of us are familiar with the trend toward feature-stuffed programs – derided as "bloatware" – that often generate complaints about complexity and ease of use. As the saying goes, 95 percent of the users use 5 percent of the features.

The same phenomenon has emerged in electronic charting, where many companies continue to produce products that attempt to be all things to all boaters – even though most use only a small subset of the available features.

The result is that, for the average boater, the most expensive e-charting package is not always the best choice – even if price is not an issue. When choosing an e-charting application, think about what makes sense on your boat and what you can reasonably manage with an onboard computer.

For example, as cruising guide authors, we do this for a living. We work from our boat, spending many months out at a time. Yet we mainly still use basic waypoint, route, annotation and tracking features.

If you're only going to use 5 percent of an application's features, then the program you choose should do those things exceptionally well. Take stock of your computer use, your vessel, your cruising style and your geography to identify these "bread-and-butter" features. Then evaluate the e-charting packages on those features, not on extras you'll never use.

What follows here is a discussion of basic and advanced features based on our experience reviewing 15 e-charting applications for the Hard Facts on Software series. It is designed to help you narrow down your list of needs. You can then consult the Feature Comparison Table to see how each application we reviewed addresses those needs. On Sunday, we'll cut to the chase and make some outright recommendations in several price ranges.

BASIC FEATURES

Some features are so fundamental that any e-charting application worth its salt must include them.

For example, a one-button man overboard (MOB) marker is a basic safety tool. With all this navigational computing power at your fingertips, there should be a darn quick way to mark a position if someone goes into the water. Although every application we reviewed has an MOB feature, the user interface dictates how long it will take you to find it for the first time or to remember where it is hidden. All the PC applications have very intuitive one-button MOB markers. In a break from the PC and Mac stereotypes, the two Mac applications, NavimaQ and MacENC, did not have a one-button MOB. Perhaps Mac users don't fall overboard?

Basic features include rudimentary navigational tasks, such as managing charts, creating waypoint markers, stringing waypoints together to form a route, logging a series of positions as a track, dropping a quick "steer to" command to reach a position ahead or converting a track into a route. These tasks are the primary reason to combine a GPS sensor and a digital chart image, fundamental tools needed by any boater who has bothered to bring a laptop on board with digital charts.

Of course, every one of the e-charting applications we reviewed performs the majority of these tasks. But they differ widely in ease-of-use, influenced by little details we only noticed after spending quite a bit of time with a feature. Some applications are more intuitive, have more functionality, or are more flexible.

As an example, basic tasks such as waypoint or route creation vary in the number of mouse actions or keystrokes an application requires to get the job done. The fewer, the better. Route creation is most convenient when you can "rubber-band" instant waypoints together.

We also favored programs with a clear presentation of route data, either in a window or along a route leg. The cleanest waypoint and route interface overall was Coastal Explorer and Chart Navigator Pro. TIKI Navigator, with its non-traditional user interface, also did well.