Rose Point Navigation showed off numerous new products and features during the NMEA Conference, as mentioned on Tuesday, but it make take a while for me, or anyone, to sort them all out. This is especially true as the company has both a "relaxed" marketing style and a tendency to put product perfection over actual shipping dates. For instance, a week after issuing a stack of press releases, there's not yet a peep about them on Rose Point's home page, but instead a link to a "sneak peak" (sic) at Coastal Explorer 2010, a product that will never actually be released! What is new on the site is info about the heavily stripped down new version of CE called CE Express, which was announced last February in Miami but in fact is the first CE 2011-style software to ship. Except that the Google Earth-like chart zoom slider seen above in the copy of Express I downloaded last week has already been replaced in the ongoing CE 2010 beta...
I've been using an iPad for a week now and -- sorry, Steve -- I'm not yet feeling "the magic". But just the fact that I can envision so many improvements to something already so cool speaks to how amazingly fast this wireless, touch screen, app device phenomenon is moving. My iPhone and iPod Touch have been almost magically transformed by iOS 4 (coming soon to the pad) and my Android phone is such a hotbed of fertile app chaos that it sometimes gets hot quite literally. And almost everything that's useful and fun about these devices is doubly so on my boat, with loads of room to grow. Which is why I suggested to the NMEA Conference crowd on Saturday night -- I got to make a little spiel again when the Technology Award was presented -- that integrating marine electronics with these things is an important challenge to them (along with addressing some of your diverse grumblings, like fixing some issues with NMEA 2000). It's also why I asked many manufacturers in the exhibition hall what their iThing plans are, if any, and, by golly, there are some good things coming...
Another show, another nifty AIS appliance from Digital Yacht. Following the introduction of the iThing-friendly iAIS receiver in Southampton, DY showed up at NMEA with the AISnet receiver above. It's a pretty obvious concept, but I don't think it's been done before, and it could encourage a nice proliferation of land-based AIS stations flowing target data onto the web...
