FAQ


Please send an email if you have any questions, problems, or suggestions for making the apps better. I answer all email personally and promptly.
If your question may apply to other users, I will post the question and answer here.
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Pictured: The friendly support staff and CEO (Brian) in our remote development offices (at the time) anchored off Santa Cruze island in the Channel Islands National Park
Why are there 2 overlapping apps that provide the Nautical Almanac?
EZ Nautical Almanac is for someone who wants to do manual celestial navigation but still needs a Nautical Almanac. It does provide a star map and helps/demonstrates using the tables for finding rise/set event times, correcting sight altitudes, and full sight reduction using the Concise Reduction Tables. You will still need to keep track of the results and do your own plotting to find your fix.
EZ Celestial Navigation does all of that and also saves, plots, and manages your observations to determine a fix. It also provides a compass check function and allows you to print reports on your fixes and compass checks. It uses pub 229 for the sight reduction and demonstrates the use of these tables.
I have just started planning the next major release of EZ Celestial Navigation which will allow the user to select the reduction method to use - Pub 229 tables, Concise Reduction tables, and others? It will probably not be available until late 2025 and will be a free upgrade.
The Apple App Store listing for ezAlmanac and ezSights says that these apps will no longer be updated. Why not?
ezSights and ezAlmanac were initially developed over 10 years ago using the computer languages and technologies of the day. With the changes to computer languages, development technologies, target devices screen sizes and operating systems, and App Store requirements, the continued maintenance of these apps is no longer possible.
ezAlmanacOne is our latest app, is coded in a modern computer language, offers a number of improvements to our previous ezAlmanac app, and provides a modern user interface that will run on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. An Android version that runs on tablets and phones is now also available.
Having trouble printing from the Android version of the App.
If you don't normally print from your device, make sure you set up an appropriate printer plugin for your printer. From the Android "Settings" app, go to Connections->More connection settings->Printing. From there you will find a "+ Download plug-in" button.
When printing any of the documents from the app, make sure you use the Print function from the main menu. There are print package options for all included documents. When you are just viewing the documents from the main menu, Android displays them in an interface that has both print and download buttons. Those don't seem to work as expected. If there are any Android experts out there that know how to get these functions to work, please let me know.
Map View Displayed on a Flat Map.
When viewing your LOPs on a map, users of the old ezAlmanac app were used to being able to zoom out and view the full line of position as a circle on a globe. The platform I am now using for ezAlmanacOne only allows use of a flat map. I am keeping an eye out for an update and will go back to using a globe when I can.