Anyone using iNavX for iPad?

[Bleemus]

I grew up on paper charts and use raster whenever possible. Vector charts just don't fit my eye at all.

[Acadia426]

I’ve just been REreading Nigel Calders excellent book “How to Read a Nautical Chart” and it struck me how much I learned from him. Some stuff directly, and a lot indirectly by viewing his side by side comparisons"

Thanks, hpeer, for your suggestion on Calder's book. I've ordered a copy.

[Acadia426]

Originally Posted by hpeer

No tutorial, it should just work....on the NOAA raster charts.

Not all chart suppliers charts work exactly the same way.

My suggestion, for lack of anything insightful to say, would be to delete all the NOAA charts and do a bulk download overnight. Maybe if they came in piecemeal it mucked something up.

Hpeer,

Is your suggestion for another cruiser to delete the NOaa charts because you don't believe they're as good as those "for sale?" Are the NOaa charts vector?

[Acadia426]

Originally Posted by RHarriss

Tutorial for iNavX

i-Marine Apps: iNavX Tutorial

I've switched away from it, and back to iSailor using vector charts. Primary nav is with OpenCpn on a nice little PC laptop with a touchscreen that we picked up last year. Everything is connected to a Nexus instrument server through a vYacht wifi/ethernet access point. We have a couple of iPads and iPhones, and some Android tablets receiving instrument data, including AIS info, via wifi.

Found that iNavX was trickier to use than iSailor, though both function just fine. I still pay for the xTraverse account, using iNavX as the #2 backup.

We're also using RaceQs for track recording during racing.

Hi RHarris,

I see that you use Open Captain. Once that's installed, do you purchase charts for the app?

Is it used in conjunction with iNavX or is it a free-standing app, having nothing to do with iNavX?

[Acadia426]

Kenomac, Since you have iNavX and a chartplotter, that's new, with Navionics card(s), how do you go about planning your routing? Do you first do, a long voyage, at home on your iNav X (iPad?) and then duplicate that route aboard with the Navionics charts on the plotter?

[Kenomac]

Originally Posted by Acadia426

Kenomac, Since you have iNavX and a chartplotter, that's new, with Navionics card(s), how do you go about planning your routing? Do you first do, a long voyage, at home on your iNav X (iPad?) and then duplicate that route aboard with the Navionics charts on the plotter?

I plan on-the-fly using only the goto functions on each unit. ‘Just not into spending any extra time planning and setting waypoints. The overall route is in my head, then I set goto points as we’re underway.

[mike388]

Hi I have been using inavx for a few years on 2 iPads and also have open CPN as back up down below .
We are circumnavigating for a year having left Philippines and now in Cape TownI have found Inavx generaly to be good ,charts accurate and great that you can overlay ais targets on to the chart wirelessly from Vesper xb8000 I normally plot a course on open CPN then email gpx to I pads as it is a bit cumbersome in Inavx.
OK.
NOW A BIG BIG WARNING.....CHANGES THIS YEAR .IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO BUY AND DOWN LOAD NEW CHARTS UNLESS YOUR IPAD IS RUNNING IOS 10 or above. By next year it will be IOS 11
As both my iPads cannot run higher than 9 it means I cannot get new charts .
I do not want to get black mailed into buying new iPads and cannot afford the expense so reluctantly I will have to stop using Inavx. If anyone out there has a work around I would be most grateful to hear from you . We really do need the Ais overlay.
We have no further charts than Africa and will be leaving in a couple of weeks.

[hpeer]

That is a bummer. Not good news. Perhaps Shawn can reply?

[svmobert]

Originally Posted by mike388

Hi I have been using inavx for a few years on 2 iPads and also have open CPN as back up down below .
We are circumnavigating for a year having left Philippines and now in Cape TownI have found Inavx generaly to be good ,charts accurate and great that you can overlay ais targets on to the chart wirelessly from Vesper xb8000 I normally plot a course on open CPN then email gpx to I pads as it is a bit cumbersome in Inavx.
OK.
NOW A BIG BIG WARNING.....CHANGES THIS YEAR .IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO BUY AND DOWN LOAD NEW CHARTS UNLESS YOUR IPAD IS RUNNING IOS 10 or above. By next year it will be IOS 11
As both my iPads cannot run higher than 9 it means I cannot get new charts .
I do not want to get black mailed into buying new iPads and cannot afford the expense so reluctantly I will have to stop using Inavx. If anyone out there has a work around I would be most grateful to hear from you . We really do need the Ais overlay.
We have no further charts than Africa and will be leaving in a couple of weeks.

I understand the feeling you have, being forced to upgrade.. But I'll just point out that for this to be an issue your Ipad has to be at least 6 years old. That's quite a run for a mobile device. You can get a used LTE Ipad Air that will run IOS11 for $150 on ebay.

[hpeer]

A clarification. INavEx does NOT make charts. They DISPLAY charts. iNavEx is valuable in that it is a platform to display charts from a very wide variety of vendors, both raster and vector.

But that also reflects the problem described above. Because iNavEx is displayingbothers charts every time some chart vendor makes a format change the iNavEx needs to change their display platform to accommodat.

It’s not iNavEx driving the changes, they are trying to keep up.

iNavEx/Fugawi are VENDORS for the charts. They don’t control the chart producers pricing and distribution and copying policy.

That doesn’t help the above poster, it’s just an explanation.

[mattyc]

Fugawi ceased operations December 31, 2019. Is this a problem for inavx users?

[hpeer]

Inavex had to renegotiate chart distribution deals with the chart publishers. That create problems if you bought charts through Fugawi as it makes the updates harder. In the long run it’s an advantage to iNavex because they don’t have the third party in the middle and the updates worked better this way, or so I’m told.

All my charts still work. I may have problems if i go to update. But I don’t do that often, because of my cruising area, no significant changes. USA charts are free so no problem with that what so ever.

[Evenstar]

Originally Posted by hpeer

A clarification. INavEx does NOT make charts. They DISPLAY charts. iNavEx is valuable in that it is a platform to display charts from a very wide variety of vendors, both raster and vector.

But that also reflects the problem described above. Because iNavEx is displayingbothers charts every time some chart vendor makes a format change the iNavEx needs to change their display platform to accommodat.

It’s not iNavEx driving the changes, they are trying to keep up.

iNavEx/Fugawi are VENDORS for the charts. They don’t control the chart producers pricing and distribution and copying policy.

That doesn’t help the above poster, it’s just an explanation.

Also - one hard lesson I learned from my days of writing and selling an iPhone App is that Apple puts a lot of tight controls on your software, and also changes things rapidly and without remorse.


As an example, my App was working fine until an IOS upgrade came out - I think it was IOS3 to IOS4. They made obsolete a specific memory management function call that I used (because I had to for IOS3). However, in the new version of IOS they did not let compiled versions of the app fail gracefully if they still had that code installed on an IOS4 phone. The App just stopped.


As a developer, I had to download a whole bunch of updated software and recompile and redeploy (with a completely different framework and method for doing it) a new version of the app so I could remove three lines of dead code calling the obsoleted function.


Of course, once the lines of code were out, my NEW app was no longer compatible with IOS3 since it didn't have the memory allocation functions, so if any of my IOS3 installed base updated the App, it wouldn't work.


So some of these "It doesn't work with my version of IOS anymore" problems are direct from Apple, because they have required changes in installed applications to support new IOS versions, while not maintaining easy backwards compatibility with the older versions on the new code.

All of which makes a huge headache for software developers trying to maintain and support different versions on different IOS versions. Keeping my app on current IOS versions as a solo developer was why I eventually pulled the App from the store and stopped selling it, it was too much of a hassle.



I have no idea if that's what's up with the above poster's chart upgrades, but changes in screen display and format are often part of IOS upgrades.