I use SEAiq a bit; it does have a few nice features.
- It's built on a different widget set that gives a much nicer native OSX experience
- It is more reliable - I've posted a number of OCPN crashes (including stack traces) that have never been explained
- It hooks up to an
AIS database (good only when on the Internet) which makes for fun armchair sailing
- The tide and
current prediction is useful - it gets data from a number of sites including xtide, NOAA NDBC, and
Canada (plus several other countries) - it's an feature under active development
- I like how the data bars
work, but that's taste not functionality
- Overall the aesthetic is easier for me to use - it offers fewer customizations, but has made good UI choices
- It can handle grb2 format
weather data
SEAiq is not aimed at quite the same crowd as OCPN - it's designed for tug captains and bar pilots with specific functionality for them (that I'm not going to list).
OCPN has its own merits:
- Additional functionality through the plugins such as
weather routing
- Smarter chart downloading wrt NOAA
charts
- Better weather overlays
-
Radar overlay (if your lucky)
- And I'm sure many more
I'm not sure which uses less
power - so far I've been able to leave my Mac running off the
inverter much of the time and have both on simultaneously