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On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:18:14 GMT, (Larry W4CSC)
tempted fate with:

I'll check out your program but we already have The Cap'n and its data
panel on the notebook at the nav station....

Larry W4CSC

As I told my beta testers, if you like it, tell your friends. If you
don't like it, tell me. :-)

As a guy with something to sell, the natural tendency is to believe
that everyone needs your product. Obviously not true. My original
thought was that I was writing something for people that already had
chartplotters and weren't interested in computer charting systems.
Just a pure data repeater function, in other words. That
functionality is mature, that is, pretty much working the way people
seem to want it to. They like having the great big display that you
can see easily from anywhere below, or even from the cockpit. The
flexibility of the display even let's them split the screen with some
other program and still see both of them. The logging feature seems
to be mature, as well.

Where it got interesting was when people started asking for more
integration capabilities. They wanted the repeater program, but they
also wanted to use a charting program. That doesn't work as well as I
want it to, because it either needs spare serial ports or third party
software to implement virtual ports. Just a bit more of a hurdle than
the typical boater is willing to jump for a shareware program. If I'm
doing a complete integration contract for someone, no problem. Even
with the third party software, it's still cheaper and better than
normal repeaters in many ways, once you accept having a computer in
the loop at all. I have a way to fix the port problem without
forcing the purchase of the third party software that I hope to put in
the next major release.

By the way, OziExplorer is the exception to that rule, because it
has a minimal API for passing information, no extra ports needed.
Unfortunately, Ozi doesn't have the acceptance in the marine market of
Maptech and the CAPN and the autopilot support is not so hot.

The other main feature, the networking support, may be a bit ahead of
its time. How may boats have LANs, after all? I do think that we'll
see a lot more of that on big boats in the near future, though. I'm
already astounded at how much interest handhelds (computers, not GPSs)
are generating. Maybe someday a cruise line will hire me to provide
networked displays for all their ships' public areas, or even
individual cabins. The master PC would capture position, speed, wind,
depth info, etc., and my program could forward it over a LAN to each
display PC, where my program could do its display thing and/or hand
the data off to a charting program. I could add custom displays like
how long till dinner, or whatever. How cool would that be?

__________________________________________________ __________
Glen "Wiley" Wilson usenet1 SPAMNIX at worldwidewiley dot com
To reply, lose the capitals and do the obvious.

Take a look at cpRepeater, my NMEA data integrator, repeater, and
logger at http://www.worldwidewiley.com/

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