Oceanic Code and Macs

[NCadiver]

Looking at this thread nobody said they were ready to pay $100 -$150 dollars for the software engineers are not free or cheap. Mostly oceanic engineer is pc engineer only since Mac had les then 2% market share when dive manufacture got into the download business.

One more thing most people forgot the download was for DAN (Diver Alert Network) so they could look at people dive profiles.

DAN Divers Alert Network : Medical Research : Project Dive Exploration : Participate

 

[reefduffer]

Looking at this thread nobody said they were ready to pay $100 -$150 dollars for the software engineers are not free or cheap. Mostly oceanic engineer is pc engineer only since Mac had les then 2% market share when dive manufacture got into the download business.

Actually, in practice, retail price really is closer to free than $100-$150. Divelog is $30 with a 30-day trial. Macdive is free with a requested donation. There are some other older efforts as well, generally also open source (read free or low-cost).

There is a community of diver/engineers more than happy to write the software and make it widely available. The problem is that the manufacturers hide the download protocols so that in addition to the effort of application design and coding, the protocol must first be reverse engineered. And then the manufacturers give away their software, but leave it buggy and feature-poor and poorly supported.

There has been a lot of speculation on why; for Oceanic the best guesses I've seen are that they originally farmed the s/w out to a third-party but at a cost of making that third party exclusive owner of the protocol spec.

Suunto seems to use the closed protocol to create an artificial marketing differential over the low-end Gekko model (no download by Suunto s/w, but it's there with any third part s/w).

Read this and other related threads; the argument that this is a straight engineering cost recovery issue doesn't hold up; the manufacturers give their s/w away, presumably to sell computers (or maybe cables), and others are standing in line to do the same, for Macs, PCs, linux, iPhones, etc. etc.. If the manufacturers opened up the protocols and let third parties write the s/w, they would presumably actually save money, sell more computers, and their customers would get a better s/w product.

One more thing most people forgot the download was for DAN (Diver Alert Network) so they could look at people dive profiles.

DAN Divers Alert Network : Medical Research : Project Dive Exploration : Participate

I don't read that link with that interpretation. It looks like DAN is leveraging already-existing download capabilities, added by the manufacturers to provide features their customers want. I don't see anything here that suggests the manufacturers added this to support DAN's PDE. In fact, this thread being mainly about Oceanic products, note that Oceanic doesn't even directly support PDE, there's some additional data processing required to make Oceanic data useful to PDE. Which makes it pretty clear which came first.

 

[hazmat]

Thank you, reefduffer. Very similar arguments I often make. I also run and use a Garmin Forerunner. When I first got it, the main reason over Polar and other manufacturers was that they were the only ones to support the Mac. I think it's still the case. I don't know why these other manufacturers don't get this point. Open up some of the protocols and third party developers will make much better software than yours, and sell your computers for you. Oceanic's software sucks.

 

[Doubler]

I brought up this same exact issue with the Oceanic Rep at the Tacoma Dive and Travel expo on Saturday. He told me that people outside of the Oceanic umbrella were working on this problem and that the programs were available. I asked him where as I hadn't seen it and told him that all I saw out there was for Sunoto. He said he wasn't aware of that and wrote it down for their engineering group. Of course he wrote it down for the engineering group last year as well when I brought it up at the last show.

 

[hazmat]

I brought up this same exact issue with the Oceanic Rep at the Tacoma Dive and Travel expo on Saturday. He told me that people outside of the Oceanic umbrella were working on this problem and that the programs were available. I asked him where as I hadn't seen it and told him that all I saw out there was for Sunoto. He said he wasn't aware of that and wrote it down for their engineering group. Of course he wrote it down for the engineering group last year as well when I brought it up at the last show.

Sounds like a good way to get rid of you.

 

[KarolinaKid]

I would think the windfall profits from the USB cable alone could fund a multi platform re-development..../sarcasm off/

I have really liked my Oceanic computer, but between my local dive shop refusing to do anymore business with Oceanic due to their support and warranty experience and the lack of support for Mac, I will likely not upgrade to another Oceanic product.

 

[RAWalker]

I would think the windfall profits from the USB cable alone could fund a multi platform re-development..../sarcasm off/

I have really liked my Oceanic computer, but between my local dive shop refusing to do anymore business with Oceanic due to their support and warranty experience and the lack of support for Mac, I will likely not upgrade to another Oceanic product.

If your LDS is using that excuse not to carry Oceanic it is pretty lame. More Likely Oceanic won't allow them to make a profit handling warranty repairs like other manufacturers do. Most people on this forum are well aware that Oceanic will handle warranty issues directly with end users. They do it regularly and turn around is very fast. The only cases I've heard of that differ are those where the product was either purchased from a dealer that was not Oceanic authorised or second hand. Other than that there is the issue of what country an item was bought in.

As for the lack of support for Mac it's best you realize that there are far more PC users and dive computer software isn't going to be the only software you'll need to make compromises on to use your Mac.
Maybe the best way for you to compromise is to use a Mac that can run windows natively.

 

[dmendelson]

I would be much more likely to invest in the OC1 if the Oceanic software were better and supported Mac.

 

[RAWalker]

I would be much more likely to invest in the OC1 if the Oceanic software were better and supported Mac.

Oceanic's Oceanlog software has gotten better in recent releases but if you aren't running windows operating system you're out of luck.
Since the new Mac can support windows natively maybe those users should consider a dual boot config so the software that is written for windows based systems can be used on their computers. Since even Apple has realized the fact that software developement for Windows based systems is far ahead of the titles for any other operating system you'd think that the users would catch on.

 

[NCadiver]

I agree with you RAWalker.