Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Diving Log 5.0 for Windows Released

Diving Log 5.0 for Windows emerged from it's beta test cycle yesterday ready for general use. This is the eagerly anticipated successor to Diving Log 4.0. As with the previous version, Diving Log 5.0 offers full bi-directional synchronization capabilities with Dive Log on iPhone. You can download Diving Log 5.0 from here. There are also links to resources on the download page to provide additional information about upgrading from Diving Log 4.0 and details about the new features of Diving Log 5.0.

Dive Log on iPhone and Diving Log 5.0 were designed to work together. The current version of Dive Log on iPhone will continue to work with this release of Diving Log. All the data entered on the iPhone or on the desktop are synced between the two applications so that no data is sacrificed no matter where you edit your logbook. This release of Diving Log 5.0 makes it even easier to interact with data captured on your iPhone. For example, images that were captured on the iPhone and associated with a Dive Site or Country could not be viewed on the desktop in Diving Log 4.0. However, with Diving Log 5.0 you will be able to see those images on both platforms. Diving Log 5.0 now offers the capability of customizing your on-screen logbook layout. This enables you to make the signature field (that you can capture on the iPhone) front and center in your desktop logbook display (see this post for details).

Another great feature that Diving Log 5.0 enables is importing dive computer data into existing dives (check out the details here). Now you can capture your dive details (site name, GPS location, weather conditions, gear, etc.) at the dive site on your iPhone using Dive Log and later "merge" those details with the data captured on your dive computer during the dive when you get back to your desktop computer. You'll now have a complete record of your dive without having to try to remember how much weight you used or who the dive master was days after the fact.

Diving Log 5.0 runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. You can also run Diving Log 5.0 in Boot Camp or via virtualization (ex. VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop) on your Mac. I personally run Diving Log 5.0 using Windows 7 and VMWare Fusion 4 on my MacBook Pro. You can read about my experiences with this set up (using earlier version of VMWare and Diving Log 5.0) here.

Diving Log 5.0 was the result of a complete rewrite of Diving Log 4.0 using the latest development tools. We'll look forward to seeing all the great new features that this new platform enables for Diving Log 5.0. Congratulations on a job well done!

Friday, March 26, 2010

Verson 1.3 of Dive Manager Released

Dive Log Manager is the MacOS desktop application that works with Dive Log on iPhone. You can use it to sync your logbook back and forth between your desktop and an iPhone or iPod Touch. You can also use it to import or convert dives entered in another logbook format into this one so that you can review and edit it on the remote device. If that logbook has information downloaded from your dive computer, that will be transferred too!

Here is a complete description of the added features:
http://www.moremobilesoftware.com/Dive_Log_Manager_-_1.3_update.html

This update will be useful for people who have "challenging" network configurations where some of the "plug and play" features do not work correctly and you need to connect to your iPhone manually. Technically, this would also give you WAN access to your iPhone but we leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to type at your desktop computer and at your iPhone when separated by a wide area :-)

This version also allows you to "link" your dive sites, cities, and countries when importing them from another format. Please see our previous Blog post, Statistics and Databases 101, for an explanation of linking. The over simplified version is this - Linking allows you to enter the information once and then "link" to it on each dive instead of typing the information in each time. As with many things, it implies slightly more administration to set it up at first, but you get some payoff's in having more statistical information later. (And more information is *always* better right?)

As always, please contact us if you have any problems or questions.