Chesapeake Times, Vol 8 | January 2022
Some of you may have noticed that we have gone a while without a new SonarWiz release. SonarWiz V7.08.01 was released in September. Development on SonarWiz V7.09.00 was started in the spring of 2021. During this time the CTI engineering department has put a lot of work into SonarWiz V7.09.00. A lot of this work has been in preparing SonarWiz for localization. Localization basically means translating the application’s user interface into a different language. We are handling this in 3 steps:
- Change most of the places we handle words and sentences, known as strings, to handle more characters.
- Gather all of these strings into one place so that we can provide different versions for each new language we are supporting.
- Translate each of these different versions from English to the desired language.
Step 1 took a majority of the development time. It had to be done in not only SonarWiz, but the libraries that SonarWiz uses and in our real time servers and utility programs. There are a lot of strings in SonarWiz! The release of SonarWiz V7.09.00 will mark the completion of Step 2. We will be adding translations in future versions of SonarWiz V7.09.
For the most part SonarWiz V7.09.00 will look the same as previous versions. SonarWiz user’s will be able to see the place where they will be able to change the native language of the user interface (shown below).
Besides localization, SonarWiz V7.09.00 features many bug fixes and some new features and customer requests. Most notably we have added channel 5 and 6 coloring for Side Scan Sonar and the ability to composite all 3 Side Scan Sonar frequency layers together. This feature allows for much better looking Side Scan Sonar data sets with Gap Filler data.
We also added Depth Below Seafloor to the SBP contact properties, and added support for Kongsberg Navlab bin files.
Looking beyond SonarWiz V7.09.00 CTI will be working to strike a balance between keeping SonarWiz reliable and easy to use while adding new features.
Harold went over some specifics in the Letter from the General Manager in this issue of CTI Times. In addition to those specific items we will be concentrating our efforts on these areas:
– Reducing CTI support load by addressing our most common issues (Geodesy, Licensing Improvements, etc.)
– Improving the User Interface so SonarWiz is faster to learn and easier to use.
– Speeding up SSS and SBP processing.
– Improving the Real Time Data Collection experience.
– Rewriting parts of SonarWiz to remove old code and make maintenance easier and new ideas easier to implement.
– Improving our software testing methods.
I am particularly excited about improving the User Interface, rewriting parts of SonarWiz, and improving our software testing methods. Those items often take a back seat to the features we implement when it comes to telling our users what we are working on, however they can contribute greatly to the overall user experience.
– Christopher Favreau, CTO