Thursday, October 14, 2010

Boat Service Log..........

The holy grail of most Cruiser /Sailors is the complete maintenance logbook, filled with details of all the systems on board, schedules for overhaul etc. etc.. I have been on very few boats who have achieved this holy grail. Most of us have a few binders containing the original manuals, a few hand written notes and the occasional half finished out of date spreadsheet. The PC should be the ideal solution, but to date I have not found any software to FORCE some sort of discipline on me. Enter "Marine Boat Solutions" . I have just bought the software so its early days yet..but it looks promising. The people at this company seem pretty responsive (I have a small delivery hiccup due to an overactive spam filter) and I look forward to future updates. You can check them out on You Tube and hopefully they will have a demo version out soon.

A Ships Logbook would be a nice addition even if it came out as a separate package.

I have no connection with this company etc.

2 comments:

Robert Larson said...

I purchased the program a couple of years ago. I was really hoping that it would do a great job at what it is intended to do and I was willing to accept that it was still actively being developed.

Unfortunately I am still finding bugs throughout. The software developers have fixed some, but others just don't go away. Much of this has to do with indexing of fields, fields that cannot be deleted (but are intended to be). I just looked again to see if an update was available, but the most current version available is eight months old and still has the same bugs.

For instance, I just tried adding an item, as a test, into the food inventory section - never stayed after entering it several times.

The other thing that I found annoying when I was trying to get it to work was a lack of simple windows shortcuts. Cannot quit using Alt-F4, few if any keyboard shortcuts that make using the mouse the only navigational tool from screen to screen.

I know the company has good intentions, but imho it is still in a beta status.

The Incredible Hull said...

Hi Robert

Thanks for the input. I haven't used it in anger as yet, hopefully they will sort out the bugs.

Gerry