EDITOR'S NOTE: The End Of The Series
No one can deny that e-charting has come a long way since the early days of a jury-rigged "MacSea" prototype used on world-girdling racers or bootlegged copies of The Capn passing dinghy-to-dinghy among Caribbean cruisers. With laptops now comprising two-thirds of all U.S. computer sales, USB GPS sensors costing less than $100, and Internet access as easy as popping in a wireless card, e-charting has become commonplace and easily within reach of the smallest vessel or even the pathologically techno-phobic.
Many of the insights we've garnered over the course of this series have been discussed in the individual product reviews or the summary in the last three days. But insights on usability and functionality bear repeating and, now at series end, we'd like to offer you our recommendations in several price ranges and the reasoning behind them.
Today's applications are staggering in their extraordinary range of capability, yet none could justifiably be considered too complex or impossible to master by the average boater. Basic needs such as displaying electronic charts, creating waypoints and routes and integrating instruments are standard fare. You can also link a complete personal photo library to your charts, stream video footage from your engine room, cruise over a fishing ground to create your own 3D bathymetric charts, display the location of your buddy's boat and download satellite weather imagery. The list of available features goes on and on.
More impressive is the fact that, today, these tools and resources are not the sole purview of large companies. In the final shakeout, three of our five picks were produced by "small shops." In fact, six of the 14 applications have programming teams of less than three! The small companies did well because they were late entrants in the market, learning from others' mistakes and providing a boat load of functionality at a reasonable price. Their applications are clean and fast, engineered by first-rate programmers rather than committees of people struggling with legacy-ware. Unlike the past, small companies are now safe to choose as partners and should be given your consideration.
And so, we give you our top picks. Similar to many marketplace comparisons, we divided 14 applications into five categories, grouped by price. (We actually reviewed 15 software packages, but one of them, CARIS Easy View, is a chart reader rather than a full-features application, and was therefore left out of our final tally.)
We recognize this is an imperfect parsing in that many lower-cost packages often contain some "higher-end" functionality. Conversely, some higher-cost packages omit (or charge extra) for certain features that are standard in their inexpensive brethren. But you'll notice that price does in fact gather many of the "similar" packages into familiar clusters. In the end, you'll need to carefully inventory the features you desire and the functions you need, and then make value-based tradeoffs.
FREE TO $100 CATEGORY
This includes SeaClear II, reviewed October of 2007; Software-On-Board, reviewed January of 2008; and NavimaQ, reviewed October of 2007.
This category ended up a toss-up between two one-trick ponies. Although NavimaQ had some unique features and easy-to-use Macintosh functionality, it really came down to a free program that only reads raster chart formats versus a more fully-featured program that only reads C-Map charts.
Although Software-On-Board delivers good functionality for a bargain price, the decision was made easy for two reasons. DigiBOAT is still struggling with stability issues and has yet to deliver on all of their documented features. And we cannot, in good conscience, recommend any e-charting package to U.S. boaters that does not support NOAA's free raster format charts. (Free S-57 support is less important because neither NOAA nor the Army Corps of Engineers have completed the conversion of their chart catalog to this vector format.) NOAA BSB charts are simply too great a resource to ignore. Unlike any other country, the U.S. issues free, regularly updated, official cartography.
Although a bit Spartan, SeaClear II is the clear pick of the litter in this category for its price (free), clean interface, excellent use of screen real estate, simple ease-of-use, capable instrument support and unique ability to scan and geo-reference paper charts by hand.
$100 TO $200 CATEGORY
This includes MacENC, reviewed in October of 2007, and TIKI Navigator, reviewed in December of 2007.
This, in fact, may have been our most difficult category to judge. Unfortunately, for many the choice here may be a no-brainer. As the ads ask, "Are you a PC or are you a Mac?" But that would be letting the tail wag the dog. This price point is especially attractive to boaters. But with only two options, is the choice that simple?
TIKI Navigator was, by far, the easiest package to learn and use of all the packages we reviewed. That surprised us, because a Macintosh typically takes the honors here. With TIKI's clever non-traditional interface, operation is streamlined and screen real estate is maximized. It also proved extraordinarily responsive. TIKI included many features MacENC does not, such as one-button man overboard creation (a priority safety feature), split windows, "steer-to" functionality, buddy boating, converting tracks to routes and supplemental data support. TIKI also did a much better job in route creation and range/bearing calculation.
