In this article we’ll take a look at the new browsers that you get to from the tabs across the new Coastal Explorer 2010 window. If you missed it, please be sure to read the first article of this series before reading this one!

Since version 1.0, Coastal Explorer has had a feature called the “Navigation Object Browser” which let you see all of the objects you create in list form. Version 1.0 also had a Route Details Browser that showed a route’s waypoints and legs in a tabular form. Back then there was only one button on the toolbar to open the Navigation Object Browser and double-clicking a route would display the Route Details.

As of version 1.1, Coastal Explorer had several more “browsers” for getting at tide, currents, weather, etc. At that point the toolbar button was changed to a drop-down list and several commands were added to the menu bar in order to let you select a browser to use. Coastal Explorer 2009 has even more browsers and menu commands, and even more were planned for 2010.

We feel it got to where too many really important features were hiding behind a little drop-down menu button on the toolbar, so the idea for the tabs was born. The display of browser tabs across the top of the window makes it very clear what browsers are available, and since each one is fairly task-oriented we hope it will always be clear which one you should use to when you need it.

The first tab is called Home and doesn’t represent a browser; in fact it’s the tab to use when you don’t want a browser panel open. When the Home tab is selected you get a toolbar that is very similar to one of the original Coastal Explorer toolbars and most of the rest of the screen is used up by your chart. (See the previous article for a screen shot of Home.)

The rest of the tabs do represent browsers and the first one is your Voyage Plan. (See the screen shot above.)

The Voyage Plan browser has several pages of information and you can select a page to use by clicking on the list on the left side of the screen. (All of the browsers now have multiple pages in lists like this one.) The Routes page provides a list of routes from the currently open Voyage Plan document, the Route Details page provides detailed information about each leg of the selected route, the Obstacles page shows automatically detected obstacles along that route, and the Timeline page shows the new timeline-based route planning tool.

As you can see in the screen shot, selecting a browser will change the toolbar to include commands that are appropriate to what you are doing in that browser. In some cases the toolbar will also change based on the type of object you have selected and this true of the Home toolbar as well. For example, when you select a route, the toolbar will have an Activate Route command added to it (as well as a couple of other route-specific commands).

The Marks browser is really the old Navigation Object browser with a less “techie” name. The Marks browser shows you everything that's in your current document and provides access to commands for managing those objects and exporting/importing objects to and from other programs and/or your chart plotter or GPS.

The Ship’s Log browser has multiple pages that include your blogs, events, and tracks. (In Rose Point ECS, this is where the Voyage Recordings are accessed too.) Basically, the Ship's Log provides access to all of the historical information maintained by Coastal Explorer.

The Guide Book browser pretty much works the way it does in 2009, but it uses the page list to make it easy to switch between different types of information for an area.

The Conditions browser is a combination of the old Tide Level, Tidal Current, Text Weather Forecast, and Graphical Weather Forecast browsers. It uses pages to select between the different types of information to display, such as tides, currents, text weather, etc. Coastal Explorer 2010 will include support for weather observations (from buoys and other sources) and this information will appear here too.

The Tracking browser is used to track other vessels. In Coastal Explorer 2009 tracking was limited to AIS, but in 2010 Coastal Explorer will add a few other options as well, including a more prominent Vessel Registry.

So that's the basic structure of new Coastal Explorer 2010 user interface. We'll cover more specific details in future articles, so stay tuned!