Good Program but Hard to Learn

This program offers great capabilities for supporting celestial navigation, but it is somewhat hard to learn to use.

In my first hour of trying to use this application, without reading any documentation, I could not succeed in entering two sights I wanted to reduce, and no ways that seemed intuitive to me actually worked. In contrast, when I first tried to use the USSPS Celestial Tools PC program I was able to enter sights right away, reduce the sights, and get a fix. Because I felt that an iPhone app should not be so hard to use, I wrote a caustic negative review.

The EZ Sights support personnel wrote me a very helpful email in response to my review, and gave me some help on what I needed to do to enter sights.

I have now used EZ Sights to enter sights, reduce sights, and compute fixes. The program does what I want, and I am now happy with its capabilities. It even has the capability to estimate longitude and get a fix from meridian transit observations alone (Use the "Best Fit Method").

In short, I now view this application as having excellent capabilities, but a somewhat hard to learn interface. Expect to need to study documentation (not built into the program) before you can even enter a sight and reduce it. If you are as old with computers as I am, its reminiscent of learning the idiosyncratic interface of an old, but excellent, DOS program. Once you learn how to use it, it is a good program, and offers good capabilities, especially for the price.

I intend to communicate privately with the EZ Sights personnel to offer some suggestions, so that this otherwise excellent program will become more intuitive to use in the future.

Brian Stipak, Portland Oregon, S/V Ubiquity

Brian Stipak about ezSights Celestial Navigation