In France, mariners know little, or not at all, about Transas company of Russian origin. The Transas Group is nevertheless one of the world's leading professional of navigation software . Founded in 1990 to St. Petersbourgh, It opens its first office in England to Southampton (UK). Application developer for maritime and aeronautical training simulators, leading ECDIS certified designer, AIS system installer, the company has provided its electronic charting systems to prestigious customers, as the Russian space station MIR in 1996. There are countless marine simulator and flight simulators equipped with Transas technology in training centers worldwide. Several major commercial harbours are also equipped with VTS (*) and VTM (*) from Transas.
With 200 million turnover, International group today, mostly run by Russian, has its Headquarters installed in Cork in Ireland.
All this to say, when the very serious Transas company decides to launch a marine charting application on the iPhone and iPad, does not hesitate to rely on a communication, well ... particularly striking. See more ...
Even the Italian Navionics would not have dared to do ! No doubt that with so... persuasive arguments, boaters will rush on their application ! But beware, this may be misleading.
The offer
Transas has chosen to provide a free application, from which you can buy and download folios of their vector charts format TX-97, grouped by geographical areas. Some folios are available for free demonstration.
It is needed 3 chart folios 14 € to cover the East, South and South-West coasts of Ireland, and not less than 18 chart folios 14 € for cruising around the British Isles ! There, it becomes much less attractive.
And, to disappoint some of you, hook by the advertising, only the coasts of Ireland and the United Kingdom are available to date for Europe, and iSailor is only delivered in English.
Patience, therefore. In the meantime, you can yet test the application to see if it fulfills its promise .... For my own, I was not really convinced.
iSailor sur iPad. The application is really minimalist.
—
(*) VTS : Vessel Traffic Service. VTM : Vessel Traffic Management. See Glossary
