TIKI and Nobeltec are not the only products with some nice features in the interface department. Raymarine's RayTech RNS uses tabs on the bottom of the screen that are similar to a Microsoft Excel Worksheet–a handy, familiar convention. Very nice.

RayTech, along with Coastal Explorer and Chart Navigator Pro, also place readouts for distance and bearing right on the chart, annotated on your course line just like you would write them on a paper chart. Again, very nice.

One of the best small touches around can be found on Barco Software's NavimaQ, a program for Apple users. The "spyglass" is a widget that acts as a chart magnifier. Drag the Spyglass icon over the chart and it magnifies an area, making it easier to read tiny annotations. Great concept.

WORKING WITH CHARTSTIKITIKI Navigator Pro's BuddyTracking system shows AIS targets (blue), buddy boats (green), and your vessel (red) in the main chart display. It even allows you to keep track of buddy boats off your chart in a separate window (bottom center).

As anybody reading this series knows, electronic charts come in many different formats: raster and vector charts are available from more than a dozen government agencies and commercial companies, both for U.S. waters and those abroad. There are also additional "assets," including aerial photographs, satellite images, topographic maps, bathymetric charts and street maps.

My fantasy package would read them all–and add to that support for premium cartography, like the ability to view Nobeltec's World Chart Portfolio or cartridges from Navionics and C-Map through a fast USB reader. Like most captains, I already have a library of charts, including a DVD of all available U.S. vector and raster charts from NOAA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as a handful of Navionics Platinum cartridges that cost a few hundred dollars each. Nobody wants to lose the stash they have. I'll want to be able to use my library when I switch to my new ultimate system.

Therefore, my new system would give me maximum flexibility to view what is already on my boat and whatever else I can get my hands on. And, in fact, there are some products that come close to this type of capability. Fugawi Marine ENC reads so many different chart formats that Mark and Diana likened it to a Swiss Army Knife. CARIS Easy View, the free chart viewer, reads 18 different formats. And Chart Navigator Pro comes with no fewer than 15 DVDs filled with charts and other assets. So I know it can be done.

Of course, if I am going to have all these charts, my new software package will have to have the ability to manage them well. The truth is that I am not a full-time cruiser–that's tough when you have children ages 1 and 3–but I do go boating on both the east and west coast every year.

My boat is on the Chesapeake Bay, where I roam throughout the season. My family lives in Southern California, and I make several trips a year up and down the coast, from San Diego to San Francisco. When I take these trips, I bring some paper charts, a hand-held GPS–and my laptop.

It would be nice if my ultimate software package let me sort my charts into folders for the Chesapeake and the California coast, so that I could load and unload the charts that I need and keep my computer running fast. Indeed, there are products out there that facilitate this system. A Mac program by GPSNavX called MacENC, uses a directory-based Chart Manager that makes it easy to load charts from anywhere on your hard drive.

While I'm wishing, I'd also ask that my ultimate program make great use of search, as Coastal Explorer does. I want to be able to type in a location and bring up a chart and Coastal Explorer is good at this. I have stumped it a few times, but not many.

Of course, my new package should also manage the waypoints, tracks and marks that I have collected over the seasons. I'm not one of these guys that has thousands of waypoints and tracks–I suspect most folks don't–but I do have my collection for the areas that matter to me, including a broad swath of the Chesapeake, as well as the Severn, Chester, Choptank and Potomac rivers.