Panning and zooming across charts was intuitive and responsive. Panning uses a traditional "grabber hand" with an arrow option as the cursor nears the edge of the screen. Zooming uses the mouse's scrolling wheel. Charts are seamlessly displayed and may be rotated to course up, chart up, true north up or magnetic north up. Charts also can be displayed in dusk or night modes. The most recent version (November 23, 2007) added a Go To Boat option in the toolbar, a great add to quickly pull up the chart for your vessel's location.

BoatCruiser also allows customization of the chart display. It has choices over a wide range of units, including statute miles–needed for two–thirds of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard–which we often use as a litmus test for ultimate flexibility. Users have near infinite control over unit metrics for speed, distance or depth. A convenient feature lets you globally set all units to either metric, nautical or imperial for the entire application.NavSimRounding Cape Hatteras northbound, a 14-mile Parallel Index Line can be set to assure safe passage.

Although BoatCruiser touts high resolution chart printing, we had quite a bit of difficulty with the printing feature. We could print charts, but were unable to print routes as claimed. Sometimes a chart would print directly from the application; sometimes it would only print from Preview. Regardless, the print quality was poor with ragged fonts and fuzzy chart images. Additionally, the NavSim and BoatCruiser page footers consumed nearly one–quarter of each printed page. BoatCruiser even conflicted with a standard PC screen shot utility, a program called SnagIt, when we attempted to print screen shots.

It is easy to create waypoints, markers and routes in BoatCruiser. In fact, you can even drag–and–drop photos or documents directly onto the chart as a way to geographically organize related files. You can turn off the linked file icon if you need to reduce screen clutter.

BoatCruiser's routes are easy to build and very visually appealing. You simply string a sequence of clicks. As you move to the next waypoint, a line rubber–bands with you, showing the distance and bearing. When you click, the next numbered waypoint is created. Waypoints are marked with vivid easy–to–see yellow circles. The route shows direction, distances and bearings, and can be easily reversed.

A particularly nice feature is the Parallel Index Line, which was added in the March 2007 update. This feature gives you the ability to visually affix a route leg in parallel to the leg you are traveling. This is useful in several scenarios, such as when you are trying to maintain a safe distance offshore when rounding a headland (see photo).NavSimNavManager is the main view for charts and user-created objects such as routes, marks, zones, tracks and annotations.

All your navigational objects, including charts, routes, markers, zones, and annotations, are managed in one central location, called the NavManager. This high–level window is the portal to your navigational assets. NavManager not only lets you locate your objects, it allows you to organize them. For example, you can copy or move charts into different folders, such as a folder for New England and a folder for the Great Lakes.

To reduce clutter, you can display only those charts for your current region with the hide and show buttons. NavManager (see photo) is an important feature, omitted in many other charting and navigation packages. These types of management tools will be particularly important in the future, when boaters will likely carry larger and larger collections of electronic chart files, waypoints, routes and markers.

If you already have a large collection of waypoints and routes on your GPS or another e–charting package, a fair bit of work is required to import them into BoatCruiser. BoatCruiser supports only two import or export exchange formats: NSO (NavSim Object file) or CSV (Comma Separated Value file). GPX (GPS Exchange Format) is not currently supported. Any import or export process will likely require an additional software utility such as EasyGPS or GPSBabel (see links), or transfers using a C–card multimedia reader.

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

BoatCruiser can connect to a GPS, AIS, autopilot, radar with ARPA or MARPA, depth sounder, and video camera. In the case of SailCruiser you can also connect your wind indicator. You can set alarms for either entry into or exit from an alarm zone, and can drop Man–Over–Board marker.