Electronic Dive Log

[dirkadirk]

This is really beyond the context of this discussion, but I think that the promise of "being digital" is here for a lot of our world, and that having separate, time consuming procedures for such a tiny fraction of our data like a dive log seems unnecessary to me.

All of my dive data (along with vast amounts of other data like family photos, genealogy information, videos, interviews with relatives who are now gone, financial data, personal contact information, writing, lectures that I give, medical records, legal contracts, etc...) lives on my laptop's hard drive.

When I am at work, the laptop is connected to an external Time Machine drive that automatically backs up everything in the background without my thinking about it (1 TB drive is about $50 now). In addition, I back up to a second external drive at home every once in a while. Furthermore, I subscribe to CrashPlan ($50/year) which is also making a rolling backup whenever my laptop is on a WiFi signal (almost always). My dive data is also on my phone and on iCloud (synced with MacDive), so that it's always with me, and backed up yet one more time without effort.

The point of this is that the important stuff isn't the laptop, or the external drives, it's the data. So yeah, a computer can fail, a network can crash, but if you are good with your data like this that should be of no more than passing concern. I hardly ever think about this process - apart from the second external drive it's all happening in the background.

And yeah, if I was worried about an EMP attack, I could just print out the dive log and have a nice little booklet to peruse for when SkyNet becomes self-aware...!

Love it, my laptop backs itself up offsite too, I know my handwritten logs take a small amount of time, but I enjoy the act of writing - it's unfortunately a dying art. The only reason I type up my blurbs is in case of fire, that may destroy my logbooks.

Glad to know I'm not the only one fearing both the Armageddon and Skynet lol

 

[doctormike]

Love it, my laptop backs itself up offsite too, I know my handwritten logs take a small amount of time, but I enjoy the act of writing - it's unfortunately a dying art.

And THAT is the best reason for keeping a written log!

 

[BFRedrocks]

I feel a little tricked by "DiveLog". I went ahead and paid the $13 for the iOS app, only to find out they expect another $3 for the Shearwater add-on. And being a bit of a green horn with all the 'app stuff', do I have to pay that again to put that on my second iOS device (ipad)? And to add to my confusion.. People say that you can use the 'DiveLog' app on a windows PC... But Seem to throw in the "Diver Log 6.0" as if we are supposed to understand the relationship. Are these two different apps? Do I get to pay again? Will they sync up effortlessly? Or will I have a PITA mapping files to make this work?

I paid once for the Dive Log iOS app plus the $ for the direct Shearwater download capability, and I'm able to use it on both my iPhone and iPad. They stay synched via the cloud sync on the app. It's been awhile, but I'm almost certain I paid separate for the Dive Log 6.0 Desktop program.

 

[flymolo]

Shearwater Cloud is now in OPEN beta!

Look forward to trying it out.

 

[Todd Dicker]

I've been really struggling with all this software. Right now I have about six different places I've been trying out, online and software based. Either the software simply doesn't work correctly, e.g., I can enter a lot of information about a dive, but not the times beginning and ending, or it doesn't customize easily.

The most important thing for me is the ability to print the dive for my paper logbook. I like the versatility of recording the dive electronically with all the bells and whistles, but then I want a nice printed form in the end to put in the book.

So I scanned a paper log form, made some changes to it, and loaded it into PDFescape. From there, I can make each field a text field, drop down menu, or check box. Once the template is done, I can record my dive, print it out, and save the template under the dive number. It doesn't allow me to manipulate the data or summarize, but it gives a nice printout for the paper logbook.

I'm going to play with Diviac next, see if that's the magic ticket for me.

 

[doctormike]

Wow, that's too bad. Every electronic dive log that I ever used had the capacity to print out a hard copy of log pages. Not sure why that isn't possible in the systems you have tried.

Sounds like you will be putting a lot of work into manual data entry without having the option in the future of exporting all of that data into some standard format for the next generation of dive logs or whatever.... For example, MacDive lets you export CSV, DAN ZXU, UDCF, UDDF or XML. All you are going to have is a bunch of PDFs, not any sort of database. But maybe if you are very computer savvy, there is some way of taking those PDF and extracting the data to create the database that you would have had to begin with if you used a regular dive log program.

 

[dmaziuk]

But maybe if you are very computer savvy, there is some way of taking those PDF and extracting the data to create the database that you would have had to begin with if you used a regular dive log program.

That's backasswards, if you're computer savvy you'd put data in excel and pretty-print to pdf when you need to. That said, I think google did a lot of optical character recognition work for their books project -- until publishing houses sued them out of it -- so now you can upload a pdf and it'll OCR it into a .doc.

 

[idocsteve]

I've been working with subsurface for the past 2 weeks and I've manually entered almost 300 dives that I had on the now unsupported diverecord.com website.

I really like subsurface and I intend to keep on using it, but it locks up occasionally and it has several bugs. I posted my questions and issues on the subsurface forum and confirmed all the problems I have with it are known and the developer is working on them.

The subsurface iphone app is so buggy that I find it to be useless at this time for entering dives, but it's good for viewing them or showing them to a dive op if requested.

 

[atdotde]

I've been working with subsurface for the past 2 weeks and I've manually entered almost 300 dives that I had on the now unsupported diverecord.com website.

Just for the records: The easiest way to manually add many dives to subsurface is to edit the data in a spreadsheet and then import it as a .csv

 

[idocsteve]

Just for the records: The easiest way to manually add many dives to subsurface is to edit the data in a spreadsheet and then import it as a .csv

Yes, they recommended I do that when I posted a few questions on the subsurface forum. At that point I was almost done entering almost 300 dives so it didn't really matter at that point. Not sure how much time that would have saved me anyway, because it means I would have had to create a spreadsheet first, then do the import as compared to just moving the graph points around on the subsurface profile.