The great app ideas keep coming! Thanks for your suggestions and recommendations. As a reminder from Parts 1 and 2, I originally gathered a bunch of my boating friends on the dock and now on the web, and we talked about apps. If three different boaters mentioned an app, then it made the list; many of these apps provide a free version, although I have included the price for the full version; here goes:
Zillow by Zillow.com (Free) – have you ever been cruising the shoreline, spotted a beautiful house and wondered, “How much?”. Well, now you can have the answers at your fingertips. Voted the #1 real estate app on iTunes, Zillow uses GPS technology to locate the listing and provides the value of homes for sale, recent listings and rentals. The current version is only available for US listings, but I understand that the company is working on a Canadian version.
I was trying to find a version of Zillow that applied to yachts so you could identify some of the amazing vessels that cruise our waters but didn’t find one. If you know of one, please let me know, and I will share it. I did find Sunseeker Brokerage by Sound Pipe Media (Free), which lists Sunseeker vessels for sale and Yacht Finder by Score Media (Free), offering listings for new and used yachts around the world.
iBoat Shows by Derek Trauger & Associates, LLC (Free) is your guide to boat shows around the world.
NMEAremote by zapfware ($18.99) allows you to connect your iPad to your vessel’s network and navigation system. Whether it is navigation data, wind speed or water depth, NMEAremote shows, at a glance, everything you need to know. Connect to all your NMEA devices over WLAN with an NMEA/RS232 – WiFi converter such as “iMux,” “iAIS,” “Seamate 1A LITE,” or a computer with the appropriate software. A similar and less expensive option is iNmea by Let’s Create ($2.99), which is a replicator application that catches instrument data from a boat and presents them on the iPad. To make it work, your instruments must be able to communicate in NMEA 0183 format over a bus, and a device that is able to collect these data from the bus and transmit them by WiFi must be connected to that bus. It could be a device like SeaMate, or a computer with appropriate software installed.
A similar app is MID WiFi by Veera Solutions Oy ($11.99) which allows you to use your iPad as an advanced marine instrument display instead of buying an external display. MID WiFi presents the basic information from the navigation system, the angle of heel and the predicted boat speed. MID WiFi receives the data (NMEA0183) over the WiFi and/or from the internal compass and GPS. The VPP (Velocity Prediction Program) tables can be easily copied and pasted to the application (email, website).
MarineVHF by Browncoat ($0.99) is a utility that lists the United States, Canada and International (ITU) VHF CHANNELS, frequencies, usage and protocols. It does NOT stream VHF bands.
Happy Apps!
