Well… now I’ve gone and done it

Hi Folks,

Dave P here, owner and managing member of NavStation LLC. Middle of last year (2019) I started chatting with the guys at iNavX about MacENC’s exit from the market. Between then and now I collected a couple of my colleagues who know code and we walked through the MacENC source to see what it might take to bring her back to life.

There’s a lot to do but nothing impossible. It’s been tough these last few years for MacENC:

• September 24th, 2018 – macOS Mojave broke raster chart display (ouch!).
• November 30th 2018 – Fugawi/x-Traverse quit the chart selling business and we lost access to all those great Navionics charts (my fave).
• October 7th 2019 – macOS Catalina put an end to 32bit native mac apps. Insult to injury!

I’m an avid sailor and loved MacENC. Seeing her beached like that just rubbed me the wrong way. Turns out my day job is in the software business and I’ve been at it for 20+ years. What started as a half serious support request to iNavX got a serious reply from their CEO. Now, after months of due diligence, I’ve jumped off the deep end and bought the source.

We closed the deal Friday 5/22/2020 and now I’d better get to work!

A few high level steps we’re tackling:

• Start construction of our new site in prep for doing business.
• Close the asset purchase deal.
• Tie out our infrastructure for ecommerce.
• Close chart reseller agreements.
• And while we’re getting all of that done, we’re upgrading MacENC. This is the long pole.

I’ll be blogging about what we’re doing and how things are progressing from time to time.

For the moment, our baby is on the hard getting a real work over. She’ll be sea worthy again once done. After that, we are going to really amp her up with new features regularly.

Till next time, happy sailing!

Dave