Has anyone used EarthNC?

[David M]

I ran across this which incorporates Google Earth with nautical charts.

EarthNC - Nautical Data for a Digital World » Welcome to EarthNC - Nautical Data for Google™ Earth!

Click on the youtube video for a better description of the product. I kinda like the concept.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by David M

I ran across this which incorporates Google Earth with nautical charts.
.

Sensational!!!!!

As I have said before the USA leads the world by releasing those NOAA Charts for free. Then smart people can do things like this with them.

If only international charts were offered as they should be FREE for safety and good seamanship.

EarthNC looks like the future.

I hope they go well and I hope governments give charts to sailors.


Mark

[Stranded Mariner]

This looks great, and I will check out all the possibilities. Just what I was looking for!

[Sandero]

Would be nice if someone would great correct and precise charts which GPS mapping is capable of. Many charts are based on ancient British surveys I think. No?

[jdoe71]

Neat concept for sure, but Google Earth, at least when I use it, needs to be connected to the web to gets its data. Seems to me that's a bit of a problem for using this product real time on the water. Or am I missing something here?

[dkall]

I've installed some of it. Picked it up at the SSCA Gam. Neat product. Yes you need to sometime be connected to the web to pick up the pages but mostly then you can pull them out of the cache for out boating. Only if you are not connected for awhile then you might be off the cache file. If you know where you're going you can load them into the cache ahead of time. The have a method discussed on their website of making more cache files.

I like that it showed me where I was anchoring was quite different than the old (yes currrent) nautical chart showed the spoil island. The island has moved approx 1/4 mile.

I too am amazed that the US hasn't combined the two to update their charts.

Fair Winds

[David M]

Hard drive memory has become as cheap at 20 cents per Gig. I would imagine you could store an entire oceans worth of Google Earth images with chart overlays on a 1 terrabyte drive for only a few hundred bucks. Do this before leaving port and internet access would be unnecessary. Bring the paper charts as backups of course.

How nice would that be?

1TB to 1.4TB 900GB to 999GB 800GB to 899GB Hard Drives - PriceGrabber.com

[MarkJ]

I have registered for the EarthNC free online service but for me it doesnt work in IE7, only Firefox.

[Beausoleil]

Originally Posted by MarkJ

I have registered for the EarthNC free online service but for me it doesnt work in IE7, only Firefox.

Oh, this is only too funny! Perhaps EarthNC properly coded their HTML according to the W3C international standards, rather than tweak it to display properly on Microsoft's non-standard Internet Explorer.

But, seriously, are you using IE6, or IE7? IE7 is much better about implementing web standards than IE6 did. But then again, I'm posting this using Firefox 2.0.0.11 on XP SP2. At home, it's Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Fedora Linux 8. I wonder if it runs under Wine?

[David M]

Originally Posted by MarkJ

I have registered for the EarthNC free online service but for me it doesnt work in IE7, only Firefox.

So give Firefox a try? I like it way better than IE. Mostly for the reduction in popup ads. Also, much less malware is written for Firefox. It's faster and there are all sorts of neat add ons. When you install Firefox, it will ask you if you want to copy your bookmarks to it. There is only one website I know of that does not work under Firefox. It really is a better browser than Internet Explorer. You can always go back to IE if you don't like Firefox.

[Beausoleil]

Originally Posted by David M

...There is only one website I know of that does not work under Firefox. It really is a better browser than Internet Explorer. You can always go back to IE if you don't like Firefox.

David,

Unfortunately, there a still quite a few public websites that are written strictly (and stupidly, IMHO) for IE. Just today, I saw a reference to Barclays Bank in the UK - at least one of their public websites (small business skills training) is IE only. How many ways are there for a business to say -"no, we apparently don't want your money because you're 'different'"? Fortunately, investors tend to frown on narrow-minded thinking like that and those types of publicly accessible websites are fewer and fewer...

And let's not mention the tens of thousands of private intranet sites of companies around the world.

At the risk of hijacking this thread, I wish the marine market would start embracing Linux as an platform for PC chartplotting. Several chartplotters are Linux-based, but they apparently don't think there's enough of a market of Linux PC's yet. They have about the same desktop penetration as Apple.

[jdoe71]

I have the site open in both browsers, doesn't seem to be a problem. It does it's thing with Google Earth, the browser is just links and a forum from what I can see. I agree with the others on FF, I only use IE if absolutely forced to and usually I'll abandon a site if I have to use IE. But then again, I feel pretty much that way about all of Micro$oft's crapware, er, ah, I mean software.

[senormechanico]

My son's the I.T. guy for his company. He buys and services millions of dollars of computer stuff for his company each year. He's a Firefox kind of guy for home boxes.

Steve B.

[David M]

Honestly, I have only run across one site that is not Firefox compatible. So should I use only Internet Explorer because of one site?..No. I use Firefox by default and only use IE when I absolutely have to. Its kind of surprising what percent of users still use IE by default.

Perhaps we need a "Onboard Computers" category for this website? It seems to be a frequent topic of conversation.

[Beausoleil]

Originally Posted by David M

Perhaps we need a "Onboard Computers" category for this website? It seems to be a frequent topic of conversation.

Ask and ye shall receive.