Dive Log with iOS 4 support is now available

Dive Log v1.4 was just approved and should now be available via App update in iTunes or the iPhone App Store. You can also use this iTunes link to access Dive Log directly.

Previous versions of Dive Log do not operate correctly on devices that have been upgraded to iOS4. You should upgrade to version 1.4 if you are running iOS 4.

Dive Log v1.4 includes support for iOS 4 multitasking on iPhone 3Gs, 3rd generation iPod touch and on iPhone 4 when it ships. Multitasking support includes both "fast app switching" and support for completing a sync operation with the desktop in the background if you need to leave the application before the sync completes.

We've also adds support for directly calling or e-mailing a Buddy from their contact information in the Buddies tab. By popular request, Certifications in the Personal tab are now sorted by "certification date". This version also includes a Dutch localization and has been optimized for the hi-res display of the new iPhone 4. Finally, we've addressed some minor bugs.

Important Information about Dive Log v1.3 on iOS 4

We're very excited about today's release of iOS4 for iPhone and iPod touch. A new version of Dive Log that takes advantage of some of the new features of iOS4 has been submitted for review and is currently waiting approval.

Unfortunately, with the good sometimes comes the bad. Dive Log version 1.3 (which has been available for about 2 months now) is not fully compatible with iOS 4.0. The new version of Dive Log (version 1.4) addresses this incompatibility and will hopefully be available by the time you read this. Please update to version 1.4 (or later) of Dive Log to avoid problems while running on devices with iOS 4.0 installed.

Dive Log has a feature that automatically enables “editing” mode when viewing sections of data in the Dive Details screen under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, due to changes between previous versions of iPhoneOS and iOS 4.0, Dive Log does not correctly display all the fields that can be edited when auto editing mode is in effect on iOS 4.0. This results in editing screens that contain only a few items to edit or, in some cases, no items at all. The only option available in the later case is to tap “Done” but subsequent attempts to edit the same information will once again force you into auto editing mode.

The best solution is to upgrade to Dive Log version 1.4 via the App Store or iTunes once it has been approved (or wait to upgrade to iOS 4.0 until version 1.4 of Dive Log is available if you need to add or edit dives in your logbook). There are some workarounds for the issue that will allow you to edit most of the fields if you find yourself needing or wanting to run Dive Log version 1.3 under iOS 4.0. Please see the “Workarounds” section of this page for details.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you. We submitted an update to correct the issue as soon as possible once we discovered the incompatibility. We’re sure that Apple is working as quickly as is practical to approve all the App updates that are being submitted in anticipation of iOS 4’s release. We’re confident that Dive Log 1.4 will be available soon if it is not by the time you read this.

Dive Log 1.3 Approved for Sale - What's New?

Dive Log 1.3 is now available in the App Store. Dive Log continues to run on all version of iPhoneOS, but some of the new features in this version will only be available to you if you are running iPhoneOS 3.0 or greater. We recommend running the latest version of iPhoneOS to get the most out of Dive Log.

Here is a brief overview of what is new in this version:

Expanded Equipment Management

• You can now set additional information about your dive Equipment including purchase details, serial number, warranty information and upcoming service dates. There is a new setting in the settings tab to control how far in advance Dive Log will notify you about upcoming Equipment service dates. The default for this setting is "never", but you can set a different period (for example "1 week before") to turn on notifications. Notifications are indicated by the application badge. The application badge will be updated even when the application is not running if your device is running iPhoneOS 3.0 or greater.

View Dive Site Maps within Dive Log and get directions via external applications

• Dive Log now shows Dive Site locations on a Map within the application if you are running iPhoneOS 3.0 or greater. This new embedded map also has a new control to measure the approximate distance from your current location to the selected dive site. You also now have the option of getting directions to the site from the Maps application or a 3rd party navigation application if you have a supported one installed (currently the various versions of NAVIGON MobileNavigator such as MobileNavigator North America are the only supported 3rd party applications).

Landscape mode is now supported throughout Dive Log

• You can now rotate your iPhone and get a landscape view of each screen. This is particularly useful in the photo viewer, the profile viewer and the new map view. You may also find it useful when typing in comments to take advantage of the more spacious landscape keyboard. Full landscape mode support is only available when running iPhoneOS 3.0 or later.

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!

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.

Version 1.2 of Dive Log on iPhone released in the app store today!

Apple surprised us this morning with an early approval in the app store - sometimes it happens! This new version of Dive Log has some great new features that we've been working on for 2 months now.

1. First, you can incorporate more photos into your logbook. You can attach a photo to each Dive Site entry and each Country entry. Take a picture of the Dive Master's map on the white board, or attach a photo from your favorite critter at the site. Lots of people are into flags so you can add a photo of the country flag to the country entry. You can also add your own smiling face to your personal information stored in the log. Or maybe a picture of the dog instead. Photo's can be taken with iPhone's built in camera or loaded from the Photo Library on IPhone or iPod touch. A quick note about photos in general - We have received a few requests from people who would like to manage the photos they took on a dive with their logbook. This is not something we currently support and general photo management is not likely to be a feature of Dive Log on iPhone. Remember, although Apple keeps increasing the memory size of its devices, it's still a phone! Adding images to your dive log will certainly increase the size of the database. There are applications that are better suited to manage your photos than Dive Log for iPhone.

2. Have your instructor, Dive Master, or Buddy sign your logbook to verify your dive. Each logbook entry can now be signed directly on your iPhone (using your finger as a "pen") on the new "signature pad" for each log entry. Now all we have to do is figure out what the modern version of an "stamp and ink pad" look like! Send us suggestions and don't "ink" your iPhone!

3. Quickly locate items such as Buddies, Dive Sites, Cities, Countries, and Time Zones using quick access indices. Some of us have added quite a bit of dive information to our logs and now we have the index down the right hand side of the screen to quickly navigate to the right place.

4. Search for a specific Buddy, Dive Site, Cities, Country, or Time Zone using the new search bar at the top of many of the lists. Sorry, we can't help you remember what it was you were searching for in the first place though!

5. Directly read your average depth for a dive from the Profile display. The profile graph now displays the average depth in feet or meters in addition to showing the average depth graphically.

6. You can now work with your logbook directly in Japanese. Dive Log for iPhone now supports the Japanese language in addition to English (and variants), German, French, and Spanish.

7. And last but definitely not least, we have done a multitude of interface enhancements, performance enhancements, and maybe even fixed 1 or 2 bugs.

We're very excited about this new release and know that you'll find it a great addition to both your iPhone and scuba diving experiences. Re-live your dives at any time by looking in your log!

Click here to see it in the app store.

VMWare Fusion 3.0, Windows 7, Diving Log 5.0 Beta, Snow Leopard - 'Tis the Season

There has certainly been plethora of new software releases in the last couple of weeks. I imagine that a lot of Mac users have wondered how all these new releases play together and if they work with Dive Log on iPhone. I've been running Diving Log 4.0 on my Mac using VMWare Fusion 2.x and Windows XP under MacOS 10.5.x (Leopard) to sync with my dive computers and Dive Log on iPhone for some time. The introduction of MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and more recently VMWare 3.0, Windows 7 and Diving Log 5.0 beta have created lots of possibilities for things to stop working. I'm please to say, that for the most part this has not been the case!

Snow Leopard looks like a pretty minor change to Leopard on the surface, but "under the covers" there are significant changes. The good news is that applications like MacDive and Mac DiveLog seem to be working just fine under Snow Leopard. I have been able to download my dive computers and sync with Dive Log on iPhone via Dive Log Manager without any problems on Snow Leopard. The one place where changes to the lowest levels of the OS can be a factor is with device driver support. I've been using Suunto's USB cable to sync my D9 with my Mac and the diver that I've been using works fine under Snow Leopard. I have been in contact with some users that have been using the CustomIdea cable and driver that have not been as lucky. The CustomIdea cable uses a chip and driver from Silicon Laboratories. A recent communication with Silicon Laboratories suggested that they were planning to support Snow Leopard and expected to have an schedule for that support around now. I'll let you know when I hear more details on their plans.

VMWare Fusion running Windows and Diving Log on Snow Leopard is also working very well. I've had no troubles importing dives from my dive computers (Suunto and Scubapro/Uwatec) and syncing the data to Dive Log on iPhone.

VMWare Fusion 3.0, Windows 7 (x64) and Diving Log 5.0 beta ... works great too! This was a pleasant surprise as everything worked without any drama. I must confess that I was a Windows Vista "skipper", so I had to approach the upgrade to Windows 7 as a clean install. This was probably for the best anyways (evan as a clean install my Windows 7 virtual machine is at least 2GB bigger than my existing Windows XP virtual machine). You may have to jump through a few hoops if you purchased Windows 7 as an upgrade to do a clean install on a new virtual machine. The catch is with activation (Microsoft is a little vague on how you are supposed to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7). I followed the steps suggested by "morrispe" in this thread and it worked very smoothly. I decided to try the 64 bit version of Windows 7 and it seems to be working without any problems. When you set up your virtual machine, remember that your network configuration needs to be set to "bridge mode" (the default is "NAT mode") in order to sync with Dive Log on iPhone. This is necessary because Bonjour (the Zero-administration networking configuration used by Diving Log 5.0 and Dive Log on iPhone) requires that both devices be on the same subnet. You can change this setting at any time and VMWare Fusion will remind you that you should install the included security software (which you should do regardless of your networking mode in my opinion) if you are going to run in bridge networking mode. Also, depending on how you set up your firewall configuration you may need to enable Diving Log and/or Bonjour to communicate on your network.

You will also need to install either Bonjour for Windows or iTunes into your virtual machine for Diving Log and Dive Log on iPhone to rendezvous. Since you probably use iTunes on your Mac already, you can just install Bonjour and save some space. If you installed the 64 bit version of Windows, you should install the 64 bit version of Bonjour for Windows (the link is on the Bonjour page, but here is the direct link to the x64 bit download). By the way, if you want to by pass Bonjour and establish you link manually you can do that using the steps in this tutorial.

You can install Diving Log 5.0 beta into your new virtual machine by downloading it from http://www.scuba-divelog.com/dl50. You don't need to install Dive Log 4.0 first (unless you want to) as you can just apply your 4.0 registration data to this build (press "r" in the info dialog). Your existing logbook data from Diving Log 4.0 will work with the 5.0 beta release.

I was able to import my Suunto D9 directly into Diving Log 5.0 under Windows 7 on VMWare 3.0. Once your cable is plugged into your Mac, you'll need to enable it in the virtual machine for Windows to use. If you are using the Suunto cable, you will get a message that Windows was unable to find a driver for this device at this point (no worries). You can download the appropriate driver from Suunto's website here. You could install the full Suunto Dive Manager release, but I choose to install just the USB driver (they are listed at the bottom of the page as being for "Suunto t6, G6, X9i, Dive Computers"). You'll want the appropriate driver for your Windows 7 install, either the 64 bit driver or the 32 bit driver. After you run the driver install application you should get all the appropriate "happy sounds" from Windows and your Suunto cable should be available as a COM port (probably COM3). You can always look in the Windows device manager to see which COM port the Suunto cable was assigned to. You should now be able to proceed with importing your dive computer into Diving Log 5.0.

VMWare 3.0 provides some pretty nice interface touches that makes Unity mode much easier to use (check out the new VMWare icon on the status bar). VMWare 3.0 also let you use all the new "Aero" UI features of Windows 7 if you are so inclined.

Diving Log 5.0 beta is looking great! There is a new version of Dive Log for iPhone that has already been submitted to Apple for review that will be able to take advantage of some of the new features in Diving Log 5.0. Keep an eye out for some more posts with information about the new version of Dive Log for iPhone.