Thanks to Jacco van Koll over the last few weeks we have made tremendous progress towards a user manual. And I spent much of yesterday to convert that into docbook and put the tooling in place to easily keep a version on this website in sync with the documenation in the git tree. Special thanks to Remko Tronçon for his docbook-kit that made all this really easy.

Please take a look and provide feedback: User Manual.

If you’d like to help test the Mac version of subsurface, please head over to the Downloads page and test the DMG that I have provided there.

There are a number of different possible ways one could package a gtk application for the Mac – and I don’t really like any of them. So I decided to invent a new one… this one contains a somewhat cut down (but likely still too rich) custom build of gtk, libusb and libdivecomputer that are all installed inside of the actual application. Because of that I am almost certain that this will NOT work unless the application inside this DMG is copied to the /Applications folder.

Update: re-did the DMG – it’s now much smaller at only 18MB.

The installer I posted after the release of Subsurface-1.2 was lacking libusb support, which is needed for example for the Atomic Aquatics Cobalt. This was fixed and a new Windows installer can be found on the Downloads page.

It’s been about six weeks and a ton of things have changed – actually, if the last time you looked at it was subsurface-1.1 then you might not recognize the new release.

Highlights to mention:

• new look with three-pane window and new coloring
• show dives “latest first”
• new statistics page
• completely new editing logic: double-click on a dive in the dive list (or right-click and select ‘edit’ from the menu on the text fields) to bring up the edit window.
• show momentary SAC rate in the air use graph
• sanitize saving of cylinder pressures (either samples or global, but not both if they are redundant)
• new xslt based XML importer
• add useful testdata instead of Linus’ sample dives
• add ability to rate dives with a familiar 5-star rating system
• more OSX/Windows cleanups and support (no more gconf !!)
• lots of random fixes

I will make Linux, Windows and Mac binaries available soon. For now, get the sources and start playing with it.

As usual after going diving, a lot has happened in subsurface.

• The way youenter information has changed radically (hint, you need to right-click and select edit – or double click in the dive list).
• Handling of manually input tank data vs. samples from an air-integrated computer is much better.
• Dives are now shown “latest first”.
• subsurface can filter the events that are being displayed.
• subsurface now has a statistics page.
• Tank pressure graphs are colored based on the current sac rate (so you can see when during the dive you were using more air, and when you were doing better).
• We added a bunch of test dives that help make sure we don’t inadvertently break things as we add features.
• We visually cleaned up the presentation of the temperature curve.
• We can now build Windows and Mac binaries.

Really, a lot has changed. Give it a try. I guess I need to bug Linus to do a 1.2 release and create new binaries while we’re at it.

I’ve had quite a few requests, so the past week I’ve spent some spare cycles on making subsurface work under Windows and I just uploaded a Windows installer binary. Check it out if you have access to a Windows machine…

You can find it on the Downloads page.

Linus’ commit message:
We've added a fair amount of features since 1.0 (like multi-tank) and
we've made things a lot prettier and supports editing much more
information. So let's make a new release.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Over the last few days subsurface has made quite a bit of progress. I haven’t had a chance to update the binaries so you’ll need to get it from git but I think we’ve come a long way.

Input of dive information is hugely improved – Location, Buddy and Dive Master now all have drop down menus but more importantly they search through existing entries by default as you start typing. That’s a much nicer interface.

There have some visual updates as well and as a major new feature we now deal with multi tank dives much better. On Linus’ and my dive computer things work well – we need others to test with theirs as they all seem to do slightly different things to indicate a tank change. But the infrastructure is there and hooking the rest in should be straight forward.

This site just moved to a new server – a much beefier 4-way Intel Xeon server with 8G of memory and a reasonably well performing RAID array for storage.

The poor ancient P4 with 512MB RAM and an old IDE disk which had served me well for a few years as my web server clearly was not able to withstand a link from Linus on G+ to this site. Oops. The OOM mechanism in the end killed not only many apache2 processes but also the machine itself – I had to remote-reboot the system twice this morning…

I hope the new server will easily withstand the load. Famous last words?

Since some people prefer not to create their applications from source I am starting to make some binaries available. For now I have packaged Fedora 14&15 and OpenSUSE 11.4 (the version of cairo in OpenSUSE 11.3 appears to be too old for subsurface).

I looked into doing Debian based versions but decided that the anal retentiveness and excessive redundantness of the Debian packaging rules was more than I was willing to put up with. If someone else wants to maintain these, please provide the various control files so I can build these on OBS and I’ll be happy to put them up here as well.

The same goes for Mac or Windows binaries (except for the request to provide OBS build configuration files… you’ll have to provide actual binaries for that).

For now go to Downloads to get the repos. And a special thanks to the OpenSUSE Build Service for providing a really easy way to making these files available.