Neo,
For the past 8 years of full-time cruising I have used Blue Chart (on my computer) to create my routes and establish waypoints to aide in navigation or to be used as permanent references (such as marking the anchorages I use or denoting dangerous places or other places of significance). Having used that program for so long a time and in creating hundreds of routes with it, it is only natural for me to compere it to Garmin's new HomePort navigation program. So far I have found a few very interesting and useful additions to HomePort that were not included in Blue Chart, such as the on screen Tide Tables and the incorporation of Google Earth into the maps section. There are a few things that I would like to have included (or excluded) in later versions of the program that would make it more user friendly. My "wish list," and an explanation of those wishes is included below.
1.Map Movement: During the creation of a route it is often necessary to scroll quite a few miles across the chart to add a new route segment. HomePort allows several ways to do this (use the scroll arrow, move the "box" in the lower right corner of the screen, or move the cursor to the edge of the screen until the "arrow" appears), but all of those involve redirecting the cursor away from the route that I am creating and additional taps of the mouse. PLEASE CONSIDER HAVING THE "CURSOR" AUTOMATICALLY SCROLL THE MAP PAGE WHEN IT REACHES THE EDGE OF THE PAGE.
2. Get rid of the "Information Bubbles": The "Information Bubbles" (The white "bubble" that has my boat name, fuel used, distance, etc) that automatically appear quite often, serve no useful purpose when creating a route, in fact they often pop up on the screen and block my view of the area of chart that I need to see while creating the route. When this happens, I have to "X" out the bubble in order to continue creating the route. PLEASE CONSIDER A "USER OPTION" THAT WOULD STOP THE INFORMATION BUBBLES FROM BEING SHOWN. That would allow users who like them to continue seeing them and users who find them very annoying (like ME) to get rid of them. The function that allows the user to place the cursor on a "nav aide" and get useful information about it, is a good feature.
3. Allow routes to "continue" After leaving and then returning to the map page: While creating a route, I moved my cursor off of the map and "clicked" an option at the top of the page in the tool bar. When I returned the cursor to the map in an effort to continue with the creation of the route, the route had been stopped. I was unable to continue the route to my destination even though I had NOT pressed the "ESC" key to complete the route. I had to create a second route to my destination and join them (See 4. below) PLEASE CONSIDER HAVING THE "ROUTE TOOL" PICK BACK UP A FROM WHERE IT LEFT OFF, WHEN THE CURSOR IS MOVED OFF THE MAP PAGE, ANOTHER FUNCTION IS SELECTED, AND THEN THE CURSOR IS RETURNED TO THE PAGE. The "Escape" function should be the only way to finalize a route that is being drawn.
4. The "Join Routes" function needs work: (See 3 above) When using the the function that joins routes, the program joined the last route segment of Route 2 to the first segment of Route 1, instead of joining the last route segment of Route 1 to the first segment of Route 2.
5. Unprompted change in "zoom level": Several times during the creation of a route, using the Route Tool, the zoom level of the map screen I was using changed. It zoomed down to a level that was unacceptable for the task at hand. I had to manually change the zoom level back to the value that I needed. This was unprompted. The cursor used to create the route segment was no where near the slide that is used to change zoom levels.
Thanks for allowing me to give this imput and for your consideration,
Chief Trip
