Saturday, June 6, 2015

GPU accelerated Marine Vector Maps for iOS

We are thrilled to announce our new  i-Boating iOS app for marine charts. It uses our recently engineered renderer that is capable of showing both vector (ENC/Shapefile/KML) as well as raster (BSB/KAP) data: end result is beautiful, detailed and fast charts rendering.
Please download the marine & lake vector maps iOS client by clicking on the link below and give us your feedback.

Main features of the i-Boating client.
  • GPU accelerated: The new marine navigation map renderer has been re-implemented to take advantage of the Apple A7, A8, SGX 543, SGX 535 GPUs for rendering. This allows us to have high refresh rates (60 fps).
  • Rotate maps using gestures: Just like Apple Maps, you can rotate maps using fingers.
  • Text stays upright on rotation: Text rendering happens in GPU enabling high refresh rate for text rendering upon rotation.
  • Analog zoom: Most maps client use digital zoom levels. For e.g. zooming in takes one to discrete zoom levels (e.g. 13, then 14 etc.). We support analog zoom i.e. when you zoom in/out, the app takes you to more finer zoom levels (e.g. 13. 01, 13.02, 13. 03... and so on).
  • Advanced Collision detection on client:  When you zoom in/out or rotate maps, relevant symbols appear (on zooming in) and disappear (on zooming out).
  • Seamless maps: All maps have been pre-converted into our seamless maps format. The renderer automatically shows relevant depending on map scale.
  • HD Contours: We do not charge extra for HD lake contours.   If you do sonar logging and are willing to share it with us, we will be happy to create contours for you.
  • Hybrid renderer: We understand that there are regions which haven't been fully vectorized or where raster charts have more details.  Our new GPU based renderer is capable of handling both data simultaneously.