Show HN: For the boaters among us, my small company made an iOS app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: For the boaters among us, my small company made an iOS app

tryskipper.com

Looks interesting. It's great you have put a lot of effort into making the app easy to use, but here are some suggestions if you really want to be a nautical chart app "done right":

(1) Don't just use the published RNCs; they are only released at 100 pixels per cm, which is too low to look good (especially on the awesome resolution of the iPad screen). If you send a FOIA to NOAA, they will give you the RNCs at 300 pixels per cm (nine times the resolution), which is what they actually use when printing them.

It will also give you a unique advantage over the 20 other similar apps.

(2) Show the user what charts overlap their location, in order of scale, and let the user control which chart they want to see at a particular time. The existing apps all try to guess which scale chart to show and they switch between them as the user zooms. (Your web app does the same thing.) It's never quite right.

(3) Use the (geo-aligned) ENC vector chart to provide clues to the UI, even if you don't actually render the ENC. The user should be able to tap on a feature (e.g. a buoy) and get information about it and set it as a waypoint.

The user should be able to plot a course to a waypoint that keeps in mind the draft of the vessel vs. the depth of the water. The user should get an alarm if their course will take them over a shoal or into a mark.

(4) Make clear on your Web site what distinguishes your app from the 20 other apps that also display RNCs aligned with the iPad's GPS fix. E.g., MX Mariner is $7 and perfectly servicable if no-frills -- what do you have that they don't? How about my Raymarine chartplotter that came with my boat -- why is this better?

Right now the marketing ("modern," "done right") resembles the puffery that seemingly every app spouts (you're missing "beautiful" and "exquisitely-crafted" but otherwise you check most of the boxes). If you want actual mariners to buy your app over others, it wouldn't hurt to make it a bit more expert-friendly and show what makes it special. More screenshots would help!

I worry that no matter how hard you work on making it easy to get started, you are just yet another app displaying lowres RNCs as a dumb raster that can't take advantage of semantic information contained in the chart. That's not "modern" or "done right" and it's not something a professional mariner would be caught dead using. Which may be ok -- you're not aiming your product at professional mariners. But better to be clear about what your app does and doesn't do than have it be an unwelcome surprise.

Thanks for your comments!

1) I didn't know that about issuing a FOIA to get higher res charts, but I'm not sure it would be very feasible. Our server processes the NOAA updates in real-time, and charges change nearly every day.

2) I totally agree, and only iNavX seems to do that, and I think we can do it cleverly. The one big feature that did not make Skipper 1.0 is the ability to press and hold on the chart mosaic, to surface the entire chart, and pan/zoom it with collars, insets, and all.

3) We do render the navaids using the ENC data. It's not perfect, but if you zoom in enough and tap on the navaid symbols on the charts, you will be able to interact with them (info, guidance, etc).

4) I hear you on the website text, and marketing is always tough. For now, we're emphasizing the automatic syncing between devices/web, automatic chart updates, the good UI, and friendly support. "Done right" is just a phrase we use so you keep reading, and find out what we mean by that. In general, the response has been overwhelmingly positive, and I think we're always going to get accused of smarminess by some. There are certainly a million things we could do to improve the website and other marketing.

Novice skipper here! Looks cool. One suggestion - on your homepage - explain to me very clearly (in better imagery or a few sentences) why this trumps using my existing tools GPS + paper maps + VHF.

For example - I recently did a yachting trip in Australia. Daily weather was always provided by the charter company. I rarely used charts and just used GPS for courses. Lastly, GPS on my iPhone was buggy. Perhaps this was just because I didn't have an internet connection and thought it was buggy. For most people they won't 'get' that GPS works when you don't have an internet connection. Might be helpful to explain.

That's a great suggestion, thanks!

We focus so much on differentiating against other iPad apps, and maybe we should speak more to the people who don't use their tablets for boating yet.

I used iSailor on my iPad with correct and reliable homing without internet connection.

As someone who sails, seeing "Correct and reliable homing" scares the daylights out of me, particularly when just referencing GPS on the iPad.

You have no way to know how accurate your location is on the iPad, and when it comes to marine use, the outcome can be fairly tragic [1].

[1] http://www.cyca.com.au/sysfile/downloads/CYCA_Flinders_Islet...

it depends. I just returned from a sailing trip and if you are in narrow waters you can compare your position with land marks, bridges, harbour structures and so on.

Worked out great. I also used Navionics before, worked great as well. I anchored over a small cable without looking at the iPad and caught it. Navionics displayed the cable under us.

My advice is to include advertisements for waterproof iPhone and iPad cases. You have a very valuable, targeted audience. (Waterproof cases can cost upwards of $100.)

Thanks! We have never tried to put ads on our product sites, but I could see that working in niches like ours.

Very cool, but on the website version, it's hard to get the appropriate charts for smaller waterways.

I thought I'd check out the local bay. At zoom levels to see anything, it shows the larger chart[1]. If I zoom in enough, it will load the local chart, but at that point, I can barely see enough of the region to be useful[2]. (Those images are one zoom level apart.)

How does the app handle this?

[1]http://i.imgur.com/htvjmRw.png

[2]http://i.imgur.com/0AZWl9C.png

Thanks, I have a couple of comments on this:

1) The app handles the charts the same way, so any defects you see on the web must live in the app too.

2) We have a plan for this though, and your screenshots (and coordinates) are super useful.

We set up the chart server such that any of our team can improve the charts, and we'd like to expose this interface to users eventually too. We have tools that let us change the cutlines of the charts, and change the layering of the charts, from a web interface. These changes get pushed down to the app as metadata, and so we don't need to change the app at all to improve the chart mosaic continuously.

We tried to do our best to layer the harbor, approach, and ocean charts in a user-friendly way, but we expect to make algorithmic and spot changes to the mosaic based on further feedback, so thanks!

3) We also have plans for a feature that didn't quite make it into v1.0. We'd like to set it up so you can press and hold on the chart, to surface the entire unadulterated chart, on top of the mosaic, and then zoom and pan it, with collars and legends and insets and everything. Since we mosaic the charts on the fly on the device, this is pretty easy to do.

More feedback for you then; Narragansett Bay (Rhode Island) near Wickford has similar issues, made even more obvious by the fact that there is an inset placed just outside the harbor.

[edit] Also, and the farthest out zoom level that shows the detail, it's impossible to find the "See Note X" stuff. I panned around a while on a 1920x1200 monitor unable to find some of these.

This looks really, really useful to boaters. I'm not a boater at all, but I am a hobbyist pilot that flies maybe once a month on small trips. I frequently use Foreflight (http://www.foreflight.com/) for navigation, planning, information, etc (while also calling the FSS Briefer to be safe!) for flights. To download the app is free but the service costs $99 per year.

Your pricing model is very forgiving. If you've got the features to support offline caching and downloading of charts ahead of time, $.99 download and $11.99/yr is a no-brainer. It's nice too that you guys didn't go crazy on design and looks like you focused on functionality and features, which is the most important for a tool like this.

Is this something your company does regularly or was it a "hey we have a few boaters let's knock out an app" sort of project?

Couple of comments:

1) We started out long ago making a hiking website, which led to hiking iPhone apps, which led us to make all sorts of mapping apps, everything from Burning Man to hiking to driving. We basically now specialize in anything that takes an offline map.

2) The pricing model is based on some other successful apps - for examples, Wing-X in the aviation space and Motion-X GPS Drive. The .99 is not to make money, it's basically just to make sure you are a boater and are interested, and it helps keep costs under control for serving the data and using the APIs we pay for. We plan to eventually increase the 11.99 subscription fee, but people who subscribe early on will get to keep the same cost.

3) We did this now because Skipper is the forerunner of the next version of Gaia GPS, version 8. We have been working for many moons to overhaul our core code, and it will lead to 3 app releases. Skipper, Gaia 8, and one more for a partner I can't name.

Super smart. Congrats on the release.

I would love to see a partnership for all the major music festivals being mapped out. Sure, they hand out maps but it would so much better to whip out my phone.

I went to Bonnaroo this year and would have appreciated something like this. Hiking, great idea also.

How about, INSIDE GROCERY STORES? I don't do much of the shopping in my household but when I do, it is usually a frustrating process finding everything on my (her) list. It could be crowd sourced like Waze whereby if Big Box stores do a floor move, you could report on it. "Crepes got moved to Aisle 3" "The Sale section is now here" and look at a visualization of this data. Categorize it by color, etc.

The answer to "Where do they keep the...?" How's that for a killer app idea. FUCKING IKEA! I'll work on this with someone. Please give me an excuse to quit my day job.

1) If you ever go to Burning Man, we do the free, open source app for that: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iburn-2012-burning-man-map/i...

2) Hiking is where we started. We make the top selling hiking GPS app, the one that people consider to be the true Garmin analog, with all the benefits of the network connected smart phone: http://www.gaiagps.com/

3) Inside grocery stores is tricky because GPS doesn't work in doors. There is nascent tech that does work, though.

Very cool! I will download it prior to my next hiking trip.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2011/12/22/micros...

A partnership between app developers and event production companies would be great; I was at EDC Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and the promotion company, Insomniac Events, produced their own app for the festival. Sounds great, right? Only problem was that their app refused to display the event map and set times without a live network connection. With 300,000+ people in one place, you can forget about 4g, so despite downloading the app in advance, I ended up just using paper maps/set lists the whole weekend. Huge waste of paper and time.

Wow, congrats. My first "real" job was working on NavTrek when Nobeltec was a startup.

Make sure you work out relationships with beta testers so that you can do a lot of onboard "tests". :-) That was probably the most fun part of the job (other than reverse-engineering the GPS models on the market at the time).

Thanks!

Beta testing is part of our DNA... there was a group of boaters using this app for months before it shipped, in many different cruising and sailing scenarios.

We shipped the first version to beta before we had built many of the features. We also get some broader test data from beta testing Gaia 8, though that doesn't help with design so much as QA.

I saw Nobeltec just released an iPad app where they drape NOAA raster charts over DEM data to get a 3D effect. I think we could whip up that feature pretty quick, but do people really use that a lot?

Definitely make the most of getting onto different boats. I am not a stinkpotter fan, so I am unlikely ever to own one, but it was a good way to experience all kinds of different craft.

The 3d rendering in the original PC product was kind of a "why not" with OpenGL acceleration just becoming somewhat common. It was very cool looking and was a good combination of bathymetric data with the charts of the time.

Mind you, we still had to deal with different geodetic data depending on the chart supplier. Seamlessly navigating from a NAD27 chart to a WGS84 chart was probably the most important feature at the time. Interfacing with as many random pseudo-compliant NMEA 0183 devices was the other. Autopilots that don't respect zero padding is a fun one when it comes to headings. :-)

Congrats building a nice product in a niche space. There's quite a bit of competition out there (Nobletec[1], MaxSea[2]) in case you haven't researched them, but at significantly higher price points.

How much trip planning can one do with your app? (ie, departure at a certain time with tides, when current is expected to go foul on me, etc)?

[1]http://www.nobeltec.com/products [2]http://www.maxsea.com/products

(edit for typos)

There is a route editor in the app, but it does not account for tides and current, unless you makes notes for each waypoint. It just lets you plot a point-to-point route, and get basic guidance. More intelligent routing seems like a good avenue to explore though.

I saw the Nobeltec products came out recently, but haven't fared all that well on iPad. The apps to beat are probably still Navionics, Garmin, and iNavX. Everyone else is tier 2 in terms of earnings.

You can charge much more than $0.99 for this.

Some improvements for the site:

* Make all the footers sticky.

* Center the lower text area on the tryskipper.com/ios/

Thanks for the comments on the site.

The app also has an 11.99 yearly subscription fee - the .99 is just to discourage non-boaters from running up our costs, and is not really intended as a profit center. Other top nav apps use this sort of pricing model too.

Still, people who have boats have money, and iOS users especially are accustomed to higher costs.

If you ever need the extra revenue I don't think you'd lose sales by raising the price.

I do think eventually the subscription fee will be raised, but we'd like to get some users and feedback now. Any subscriptions purchased now will stay the same price forever, though.

"Still, people who have boats have money, and iOS users especially are accustomed to higher costs." ~ Geez Miles, don't mess things up for us those poor boat owners among us. iPads, iPhones, MacBooks are super expensive and any price breaks would be much appreciated.

well I am kind of disappointed buying the app. I hoped for using it as a weather overlay for my lake sailing in germany, but without the subscription the app is useless :(

Why are you using the raster charts instead of the S57 vector charts? eg. http://www.charts.noaa.gov/ENCs/ENCs.shtml

Also, if you're interested in AIS support take a look at https://www.github.com/bcl/aisparser/

On S57, couple reasons:

1) Our attempt to render S57 on the device isn't good enough for prime-time yet, but that's something we'll eventually do. We decided we needed many more months to get the styling right.

2) We are thinking about merging S57 with OSM data to make a seamless land/see map.

3) The raster charts are only 2 gigs for the US, and the vectors are only about half that. So, the space savings isn't a big win, whereas pretty charts is a big win.

AIS parser is really interesting! We might have to make use of that, thanks.

You have some competition in the iOS app store, but if you make a Windows Phone version, you'll be the only marine navigation app not using bing maps.

Edit: Just to add, I think you're charging too little.

Our general plan is to build native apps for iOS and Android, and serve other platforms with the web app. cloud.skipper.com is not done yet, but when complete, it should do most of what the app does. We also may wrap and tweak the website for things like a Mac or Windows app... it's architected to make that possible.

I used work for one of the "big guys" writing embedded mapping software for chart plotters, and this looks very, very nice. Great work! Could be very disruptive to a market stuffed with entrenched old-timers.

Also valuable to the surfing community.. nice work. I've been playing with NOAA data for personal forecasting for a while.. great to see it used in a commercial product other than surfline..

Hi Andrew - what is your connection to Boca Grande, FL? I see you used it in the example screenshots. I grew up fishing in Bull Bay and around Boca.

No real connection, sorry!

Savannah, who does most of our support and marketing, just needed to come up with good tracks to use for example screenshots, and we didn't want every screenshot to reference Berkeley. That data is an imported GPX file.

This looks beautiful, do you have to buy specific charts? $0.99 is a lot cheaper than other chart apps I have looked at.

For .99, you can view all the charts, but you don't get a lot of the features.

For 11.99/year, you can cache whatever charts you want for offline use, and they all get automatically updated, whenever NOAA updates the charts.

We also set up the app with a "Test Drive" button. You have to pay the initial .99 to get the app, but you can Test Drive all the subscription data and features before deciding to subscribe. Test Drive works for one full app run, and you can do it as many times as you like.

Also, you can browse the charts on our website: http://www.tryskipper.com/charts/

HeroLight is hard to read on that background and looks rough around the edges on a non-retina screen.

Always great to see Berkeley companies on here. Nice work!

Shout out to our intern Anting from the University of Berkeley, who has totally become the dev lead on our cloud website. He learned our web stack like it was nothing - Angular, CSS, Django, and Python.

   http://cloud.gaiagps.com
   http://cloud.tryskipper.com

The progress on these sites has been tremendous this summer, with him on it full-time.

I really think the people you meet in the Bay Area justify the cost of running a business here.

I'm pretty sure I know Anting (Cal student here too) and he's crazy smart. Keep up the good work!

Looks Nice, does it work in europe, or is it US only?

The charts and tides are US-only, though the app does include aerial, topo, and road maps, and weather info, from all over the world.

If this launch goes well, we'll almost certainly start getting international charts in there. There are only a few countries where you don't need a license, so it's boats a development and business management challenge.

I'd also like to figure out how to either license or crowd-source inland lake data. We don't have much besides the Great Lakes (and topo maps) for inland right now.

Are your maps ENC maps ? [1] If so, are your updates encrypted ?

It seems to be a requirement to use the app as the official maps, otherwise you would still need a paper version of it.

Also : Is the US one of the countries where you don't need a license ? (I'm not from the US)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_navigational_chart

The charts are the official BSB raster charts from NOAA. The US is one of the few countries that makes their charts free and open. There is no encryption of any sort.

As the owner of www.fsailbo.com, I approve.

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