Summer Newsletter from Smartcom Software
Posted on Thursday, July 29 @ 05:45:59 CDT by Editors
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With the summer sailing season well underway, here's the latest news from Smartcom Software.
To encourage you to get those last minute bits and pieces, we are running a summer sale. All purchases made before the end of August get a 20% discount - just enter the code summersale in the shopping cart.
TeamSurv - Helping Create Better Charts
In January the TeamSurv project began, working on crowd sourcing to provide better depth data on charts. In a nutshell, if you sign up to the project you log data whilst doing your normal sailing, using either a software or a hardware data logger, supplied by us free of charge. Once ashore, you upload the data to the web server, where you can see it and the data uploaded by everyone else. This will provide better depth data for coastal waters, where charts are either not up to date or not as detailed as you would like.
We have spent the last 6 months getting the infrastructure in place and developing the data loggers - leaving little time for much else - and now we are recruiting volunteers to participate, so if you are interested go to www.teamsur.eu and sign up. The more people that participate, the better the results. As well as concentrating on recruiting loggers, we are also now busy coding up the tidal corrections, using a combination of tide height predictions (from TideWizard) and live data from sea level gauges around the coast.
We are the project coordinator and the technical lead, and the other partners in the project are Amber Route (in Lithuania) and MPG Software (in Slovakia).
In Print and Online
Those of you who read Yachting Monthly will have noticed that I now have a regular column there, as well as periodically doing gear tests for them and other magazines. I trust at least some of you find the articles interesting.
For the TeamSurv project, we are trying to use social media as much as possible for recruiting volunteers as well as for keeping people informed about the project. We have a TeamSurv group on LinkedIn, and also a TeamSurv page on Facebook, as well as contributions to many of the forums. In addition, of course, there is the TeamSurv web site, where I am writing a blog that you can subscribe to.
It is the first time I've been involved in using social media to this extent, and I am pleasantly surprised at the results. I had previously envisaged that relatively few boat owners would be active online, but I have been proved wrong. You will see us moving towards greater use of these tools in the future.
New Faces
Smartcom Software is expanding - we have been joined by Mark James as a software developer, with Monika still doing good work for us. Mark has previoulsy worked for Reeds Online and Norcom, amongst others. In addition, for the summer we have Licia Biserna working on Italian translations, and Chico Bell working on a new version of TideWizard (which will also be available online).
Windows 7 and Installing on a New Machine
Windows 7 is proving to be very popular, judging by the number of people asking if our software will run on it. Basically, all of our products will run on Windows 7, the only exception being that SmartMet and WinAstro will not run on the 64 bit versions. Earlier versions of our other packages may not install on 64 bit operating systems, but if you download the latest version from the downloads page then you should find everything is OK.
Don't forget that when you install our products on a new computer, you will need a new unlock code, as this is computer specific. As it is not the first unlock code for the product, it is processed manually. To get it, either select online registration, which sends an e-mail to us, or e-mail support@smartcomsoftware.com, or phone us on +44 (0)23 9265 8265. If e-mailing or phoning us, please ensure that you have the registration number (e.g. TWE 12345678) that was issued when you purchased the software, and the new serial number, which you will find in the top right hand corner of the registration window that comes up when the program starts up.
When you install the software, it runs for 30 days without needing registration, so there is no need to register immediately. But please don't leave it till the morning you are setting sail, as we are not always able to process registration requests immediately.
Online Trials and Tribulations
Some of you may have noticed that we had a period of outage with our web sites, and our PC Navtex site is still down. This is because of a hardware failure on the server, which took a while for the ISP to repair, and then deciding to upgrade the DotNetNuke content management software from version 4 to 5. Unfortunately when we switched on the multi-lingual aspects needed for the TeamSurv site, this revealed a gaping security flaw, and we had to go back to version 4. With the pressure of other projects, we haven't yet had time to convert the format of the PC Navex site, to bring that back online, so apologies to those who miss it.
This isn't a criticism of DotNetNuke - generally it does a great job for us. But, as with a lot of open source software, the quality control is not always what it could be. And, acting as a framework for many 3rd part modules, these often interact with each other in unexpected ways. There may not be a cost to purchase open source software, but there is a cost in the extra time required in configuring and managing it.
NMEA Data Logging
Many years ago we developed a product for logging and displaying NMEA data, WinLog - still available as a free download from our web site. For the TeamSurv project we needed some better software, and we also needed a hardware device for those not using a PC on board. In addition to its use in TeamSurv, data logging is useful for recording the tracks of boats and vehicles, for recording race boat performance data, and for taking snapshots of NMEA data when installing and troubleshooting instrument systems.
On the software side, we have SmartLog for Windows. This takes in NMEA data, decodes and displays it, and logs it as NMEA data files. Data is displayed as raw NMEA, as numbers, as a graph against time and as a track on a coastal outline chart. It logs all incoming data, and although at present it just displays GPS and depth data, this will be enhanced over time. The software is designed so that it can share the COM ports with any chart plotter software yu may be using. It is currently available as a free download from our web site, so give it a try.
The hardware device, SmartLog USB, connects to one or two NMEA devices, and logs the data to a USB memory stick. Logging data from as soon as it is powered up, it is ideal for quietly recording any NMEA data in the background. A limited number of these are being made available on free loan to those in the TeamSurv project, but others can purchase the logger from our web site.
We will shortly have a tool that takes the log files and decodes the most common NMEA sentences into a CSV file, so they can easily be read into a spreadsheet or a database.
If you find either of these tools useful, why not share the data by joining TeamSurv?
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