The Most Popular Feature Requests

[cagney]

A Pre Poll!

Which are the most popular feature requests? Why not find out?
More about why I start this thread below.
To find out, we will have a preliminary round where everyone is invited to list their 3 favorite requests.

Please list them like this, so that they are easy for me to find:

1 Request one, with very short description
2 Request two, with very short description
3 Request three, with very short description

After that go on describing why, arguing your case, etc, etc.

Later on, after about two weeks, I'll put together a formal forum poll, consisting of the 10 (or there abouts) most popular requests.

There are more than 150 feature requests in the tracker. It's not easy to choose and put a priority on all those requests. So Dave came up with the idea of a poll, and I'm guilty of suggesting this two stage poll.
A new round of development releases are just around the corner and this poll will give a strong indication of the priorities of the OpenCPN community. There are however, no "guarantees" that the the "winner" will be implemented, but let's say that there will be a certain pressure ...
What is of great immediate interest to the active developers is an answer to this question. Are there some simple requests, in the meaning "easy to implement", that will satisfy a lot of users?

Thomas

[P_Dub]

Where do you want the features to be listed?
Regards
P_Dub

[barnakiel]

1. the software to run on Android,
2. the software to support geo referenced bmp overlay / transparency,
3. the software to support weather routing (both statistical - Pilot Charts data - and GRIB wise - wind and waves - optimisation for speed and comfort),

b.

[P_Dub]

To be able to adjust the vessel dimentions (length and breadth) and location of the GPS antenna and or AIS Antenna. Very often the ships personnel does not seems to know the exact location of the equipment, so a pilot as to be able to know those positions.
Regards
P_Dub

[MarkJ]

1) Drawing tools.
2) Ability to cut and/or paste the whole Lat and Lon at one time.
3) Ability to have different Plan Speed Knots for each leg in a route. For example I may do 6 knots on a downwind leg but I want to be able to adjust the upwind legs to 5 knots.

[alex2035]

1) Drawing tools, just to draw some boundaries, rectangular or circled and some annotations.
2) Alarms (sound and/or visual), I think OCPN has none?, it would be good for XTE, and in/outbound from areas (like from request 1) and an arrival to waypoint
3) split chart display, for the general view and the closer zoom (picture)

[SethDart]

1. Change the toolbar to use wxAUI Toolbar (better docking features, but we may loose transparency)
2. Rewrite input/output settings to handle multiple nmea input, route them inside to the proper handlers. Same for output (autopilot, send to GPS, initiate DSC calls...)
3. Implement grib edition 2, maybe using grib api: GRIB API

+ (generic) Enhance chart management to be able to select what is to be displayed or not, pre-process S57

[janp391]

Re: The Most Popular Feature Requests
1. If there is a way to speed up in and out zooming in the chart (cm93) is #1 for me
2. More tide information in N Europe (currents)
3. Presentation of GRIB wind info also colour coded
And again thank you for a very good program

[kiltym]

1. Drawing tools with boundary crossing alerts, but configurable for individual boundaries, as in, not every boundary creates an alert.
2. Ability to lock waypoints on a more granular level, either by individual waypoint, or by route perhaps.
3. Ability to change from True to Magnetic calculations (I realize this is a controversial topic, but many many people prefer to use Magnetic throughout their boat instead of True). Don't kill the messenger.....
3.5 Re-do the route display panel to allow it to be moveable, configurable (size, font size, etc.), and customizable (remove the "road" for instance).

[dpons]

1) That it runs on Debian. You can't claim it runs on Linux if it doesn't run on Debian.
2) Second the alarms for proximity, for XTE, etc.
3) That zoom out works. It seems to get stuck around -1.4x of image size.

[wdkester]

1. Ablity to selectively display charts. eg. check off boxes for "never quilt this chart"(but allow it to be displayed unquilted) and "never display this chart" This will allow you to keep the same set of directories for planning and navigating.
2. A plugin for weather routing (wind, current) First cut I would optimize for speed and only display wave gribs. This implies fixing the current grib as it currently isn't working.
3. Under Route Manager, have buttons for "Export Tracks Only" and "Export Marks/WP Only" and "Export Routes Only"

These 3 items are much less important to me than the NGA chart conversion project.

[Littlechay]

1. A more complete implementation of GRIB layers, and the ability to request a GRIB from withing OCPN or at least the ability to generate a formated request that can then be emailed to SailDocs etc..
2. Global tides & Currents, there seems to be almost nothing outside of the US and EU.
3. Ability to import an calibrate image files from within OCPN.

[barnakiel]

Originally Posted by Littlechay

3. Ability to import an calibrate image files from within OCPN.

YES!

b.

[jonasaberg]

1. Weather routing.
2. Configurable export of NMEA sentences on selected output port.
3. Enhanced grib/weather presentation

Weather routing:
I have had access to a weather routing system while sailing in the Baltic for a few summers and have found it to be a very useful tool. By picking when to sail long distances it is great to be able to pick when to sail to get a broad reach all they way, and to avoid foul weather.
The best would be to be able to feed the own-ships polar curve (the boatspeed as a function of the angle towards the wind and windspeed, i.e. BSP=BSP(TWA,TWS) in to the system so that the speed and later position of the own ship can be calculated as a function of the weather forecast.
The polar can be found from a IMS certificate for the boat type, a free Excel sheet availlable on the net or some low cost sail performance softwares.
A great tool would be to:
a. Pick a specific time when the grib is plotted at some future time
b. Be able to have the own boats polar follow the mouse pointer when it is moved around to see how the own boat can sail at that future position and time.

Configurable NMEA sentences:
There are a some built-in nav systems that can relay information from a pc based system on the cockpit displays. For this reason it would be nice to be able to select which NMEA sentences that are sent out on a selectable com port.

GRIB Presentation:
Animations of predicted weather, interpolated weather changes, time slides etc


/J

[alex2035]

Originally Posted by Littlechay

2. Global tides & Currents, there seems to be almost nothing outside of the US and EU.
.

I have tides, replace harmonic and harmonic.idx from the tcdata folder with this files from WXTide 32 (you run this without installing and it gets generated), I have all the South Atlantic which is what I need, I think you have global coverage.