Quote:
Originally Posted by K_V_B
I used to use MaxSea Timezero for the iPad. Then an iOS update broke it, and it took half a year for MaxSea to bring out a fix
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While these sort of experiences are, without question, unacceptable, I must report we have been cruising full time for 4.5 years now and no nav app that we use has ever broken down due to an iOS update. Perhaps such breakdowns used to happen, as reflected by your comment on experiences before 2014, and certainly could happen again, but I can confidently say have not happened since early 2014.
We currently have installed:
(1)
Garmin BlueChart (discontinued but works perfectly!)
(2)
Garmin Active
Captain (the replacement for BlueChart)
(3) MaxSea TimeZero (
amazing "raster", i.e., "real" charts)
(4) Jeppesen Plan2Nav (official
C-MAP, discontinued but works perfectly!)
(5) Imray Navigator (sort of the "new kid on the block" from 2017)
(6)
Navionics
We have several apps because we run at least a couple per region that we navigate, to cross-reference (we've found chart errors in them all except MaxSea TimeZero), and as we have gone into new regions I sometimes wanted to "test" an app. The keepers are, from best to worst:
(1)
MaxSea TimeZero - just excellent highly readable strictly official
government "raster"
charts that are like having paper onboard. If you connect to
instruments, you get full chart plotter functionality with
wind,
depth, and
AIS. It's like looking at a
Furuno TZ chart plotter.
(2)
Navionics - most up to date
charts with lots of detail, though
on occasion the detail fails to deliver.
(3)
Garmin BlueChart - to this day you can download the app to new iPads if you ever downloaded the app years ago and if you purchased maps you can download them. Our purchases cover huge swaths of the planet for which we paid very little
money, less than $100, I believe.
(4)
Garmin Active Captain - easy to use inheritor of BlueChart but its charts are very expensive. Still, we were given over $1,000 in free charts as compensation for the discontinuation of BlueChart. While the free charts don't cover as much as BlueChart, the app is very good.
The ones we bought, downloaded a region for, say, $30 or $50, and will never bother with again are:
Imray Navigator. While the app is slick, modern, and the charts are highly, highly readable, possibly
the best out there (only beat perhaps by NV Charts), the charts lack detail except for the most popular harbors and
marinas, and so are nearly useless for people who mostly
anchor out, like we do. But people who go from marina to marina would probably benefit greatly from this app given how clear its charts are.
C-MAP (Jeppensen Plan-2-Nav). Official
C-Map product. Awful charts. Basically a vector digitalization of the official charts, so little if any value added. The slowest of them all, possibly due to constant internal
security verifications. The worst part is that if you zoom out, the charts don't hint that if you were to zoom in, all kinds of obstacles and dangers lurk at larger scale and these dangers are only shown in C-MAP if you zoom in, sometimes having to zoom almost to the max.
By way of contrast, Navionics is very good at hinting dangers even if you are zoomed out.
Cheers,
Linear Mode
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