Practical Sailor Review of Navigation Programs

[rgleason]

A friend of mine wrote advising me of this article. Opencpn got very good coverage, and they liked the program. Does anyone know more than this?
Said it ran on Linux, Windows and MAC.

[denverd0n]

Yes. Lots of people know more than this. In fact, if you just read some of the threads in this particular sub-forum, you, too, will know more than this. There is a LOT of information about OpenCPN here.

[wdkester]

I have the article and here are some points mentioned:
-MacEnc, GPSNavX, Polarview and OpenCPN were compared
- authors are very professional programmers
- OpenCPN 3.2.2. tested
- seemed to be using the Mac for testing and mentioned a crash caused by unplugging the GPS
- saw a disapearring route names bug
- restart seems to fix these bugs
- using vector charts they felt that PolarView had a much brighter chart presentation (showed an example)
- didn't seem to know much about plugins ; no mention of GE, GRIB etc
- really liked the route creator
- almost as user friendly as MACENC
- bottom line "With seven years of experience with MacEnc, we can't give up on it, but if we were starting anew. OpenCPN would be our first choice."

[Rakuflames]

Originally Posted by wdkester

I have the article and here are some points mentioned:
-MacEnc, GPSNavX, Polarview and OpenCPN were compared
- authors are very professional programmers
- OpenCPN 3.2.2. tested
- seemed to be using the Mac for testing and mentioned a crash caused by unplugging the GPS
- saw a disapearring route names bug
- restart seems to fix these bugs
- using vector charts they felt that PolarView had a much brighter chart presentation (showed an example)
- didn't seem to know much about plugins ; no mention of GE, GRIB etc
- really liked the route creator
- almost as user friendly as MACENC
- bottom line "With seven years of experience with MacEnc, we can't give up on it, but if we were starting anew. OpenCPN would be our first choice."

Yeah. You don't just unplug an external device from a Mac. You have to "eject" it properly. But most Mac users know that.