I’m coming late to the messing around with AI party. Partly, it was dissatisfaction with early code completion helpers which seemed alternately helpful and destructive in about even measure. Maybe a fearful premonition that most of my skills are soon to be obsolete. Then I had a few episodes of being gobsmacked by what Claude could do as a coding assistant and then began hooking up Claude as a DeepZoom assistant.
I know! Seems crazy at first, but there are a bunch of cool new features and simplifications that this integration unlocks.
Hint You can click the right arrow to execute the sample commands.
Examples
Preface commands with “New Trip.” to remove existing routes and markers. Or you can delete by type “delete all routes”.
Routes
New Trip. Create three routes, the first from Seattle to Everett, the second from Everett to Bellingham, and the third from Bellingham to Vancouver. Each at a speed of 6 knots. Start each route on subsequent days. All departing at 9am in the morning. The first trip departs on July 4th.
color each route alternately blue, green, and red
make the first route start July 2nd at 10am, and the second route start two days later. Make the route to Vancouver begin when the second route completes.
delete all routes.
Markers
add a marker
create a marker with the name "HH:MM" and using a pin icon
change all markers to the fishing icon
General
What is a knot?
Show help
How do I get to Carnegie Hall
Hint When changing topics with Claude, it helps to press the “Clear” button to remove previous context.
Caveats
Claude makes mistakes! This is brand new code! Possibly buggy! Use at your own risk! Save often!
Claude’s responses are influenced both by the text you provide for each command and by the “System Prompt” used to acquaint Claude to DeepZoom’s universe of concerns. This “System Prompt” is unexpectedly tricky to get right, and Claude’s responses can vary with slight changes in emphasis and punctuation. Kind of a herding cats situation. The “System Prompt” is undergoing continuous refinement, and consequently you can expect your results will vary with each DeepZoom release.
Not all DeepZoom command features are yet integrated in the the Claude prompt. Let me know if there’s any additional automation features you’d find useful.
Wait, who’s paying for this?
Presently, Claude self-reports a cost of about $0.005 - $0.07 per call, although my Anthropic charges seem to be accumulating at a much higher rate :(
For the moment, I haven’t figured out how to charge high use users for this new feature. So it’s free for the near future, until either the charges get burdensome or I figure out some alternative. Any ideas, other than raising the price or requiring a separate purchase of a block of AI credits?
Nautical chart imagery has been added for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway.
Each country, and sometimes different regions within each country may use different datums for
establishing the zero reference point for depth measurements. For example, coastal USA depths are measured relative to mean lower low water (MLLW) in feet.
Charts for almost all of the rest of the world use metric units.
Coastal Canadian waters measure depths relative lower low water, large tide (LLWLT), while depths in the Great Lakes are referenced to International Great Lakes Datum (IGLD).
When DeepZoom displays chart areas with differing units, the units are shown as mixed, as below.
USA Tides and currents refresh
All of the USA tides and currents are now updated to the latest NOAA December 2025 data release.
Tide and current data is available between the dates of 2020.01.01 through 2040.12.31 inclusive.
Thanks, as always to David Flater (xtide) for collecting and publishing the .tcd files which I use to generate the the millions of
tide fragment files which enables DeepZoom’s rapid display.
International tide stations, NOT!
I attempted to add International tides using TICON-4 harmonics, but gave up when the results seemed close, but not close enough. See: (Github: deepzoom-ticon4). Just figuring out which of the differing online tidal websites was authoritative is the first hurdle. Then there is a dearth of information regarding datum and active time zone. So verification proved challenging.
If you feel like hacking away at the TICON-4 code, I’d be delighted to help!
Magnetic Variation update
DeepZoom optionally displays the magnetic heading for each leg of a route (see the Settings page). The model used to compute this value has been updated to the World Magnetic Model 2025-2030. (NOAA)
Serenade is for sale
It is with great sadness that we’ve decided to put Serenade up for sale. Serenade is a 1997 40’ Pacific Seacraft cutter designed by Bill Crealock. We have been through many adventures together over the last 25 years and I can vouch that Serenade is a sturdy and stalwart companion, a beautiful and safe haven in any and every storm.
While cruising last summer north of Vancouver Island, ML took a tumble while hiking (she claims forest trolls pushed her) and has had a two surgeries to fix a badly broken elbow. And I have a shoulder which is unraveling a few decades after a serious motorcycle accident, so it’s time to introduce Serenade to new traveling companions.
Just click (or tap and hold on touchscreens) near a small bullseye to add waypoints at the start and end of your route.
The route will be the shortest path through a predefined traffic network. Click on the route to add more constraint waypoints. Drag either end of the route, or the constraint waypoints to redefine the route.
Once you’re satisfied with the route, exit Autoroute mode. You can then further refine the route using the standard Manual route tools, moving waypoints, adding to either end of the route, or splitting the route into fragments.
Routes can be arbitrarily long and are pretty fast! Try something wild like starting a route in Anchorage, AK and ending in Newport R.I.
DEEPZOOM IS A PLANNING TOOL. DO NOT TRUST ANY AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED ROUTE FOR NAVIGATION WITHOUT THOROUGH REVIEW. AUTO CREATED ROUTES ARE NOT FILTERED BASED ON THE DRAFT OF YOUR VESSEL. SOMETIMES THE AUTO ROUTE IS ONLY A FEW FEET DEEP SUCH AS THE GULF ICW!
How it works
DeepZoom uses the “wisdom of the crowd” to define the auto routing network.
A heatmap of the frequency of AIS tracks over the course of a full year is used to create a network of nodes and edges.
Manual editing further refines the network, avoiding obstructions and shallow areas.
Each edge is a potential pathway.
Each node is a potential waypoint.
Auto routes are the the shortest path through the network between the waypoints you place at two or more nodes. The route follows waypoints you’ve placed in numerical order.
To remove a waypoint, drag it onto another waypoint which will merge them into a single waypoint.
Editing and verifying the network is a massive undertaking. I started with waters I’ve frequented, and expanded from there. Feedback is welcome! What works, what doesn’t.
The best way to show an error is either a screen shot with LatLong displayed, or click on the copy link button in the upper left corner of the display and paste that into an email
to jay at deepzoom.com.
Do you have an interest in helping edit the network? If so, drop me an email, again jay at deepzoom.com.
Other new features
Routes are auto named in the format “Start to Finish”. If you reverse the route, the route name is also reversed. If you name a Trip in the format “Start to Finish”, reversing the whole trip will swap the Start and Finish names.
You can disable auto renaming at Settings.Routes.NameRouteFromEndpointLocations. If you manually edit a route name, your edits will be preserved.
When manually editing a route, you can now extend the route from either the start or end waypoint. Select the waypoint, then click the “+”.
Any operation which alters geometries is automatically saved in an undo stack.
This includes adding, moving, and deleting markers or routes, as well as reversing routes or trips.
The entire state of the trip (routes, markers, and scripts) as of that moment is saved as a snapshot.
The size of the undo and redo stacks is not limited.
Any new geometry change resets the redo stack. Loading or saving a trip resets both the undo and the redo stacks.
Note that changes which do not affect the geometry are not automatically saved.
So modifications to say route start time or route color are not saved unless the geometry is affected.
While this may seem like a somewhat arbitrary distinction, undoing state with no immediately visible
outcome didn’t seem user friendly.
The undo / redo buttons are only visible when in editing mode.
You can now merge routes by dragging endpoints together. The route endpoint being dragged is the source route, the other route is the destination route.
The name, direction, speed, and color properties of the destination route are preserved.
Other new features
An account now includes boatname, which is going to be displayed as part of a future tracking feature.
Added webcam marker icon.
Added bidirectional client/server communication using signalR. At present this is used to indicate when the server will be going down for maintenance.
Bug Fixes
Markers were sometimes not saved in a trip. Doh! Sorry! Fixed.
Improved route editing by eliminating spurious route snipping and vertex deletion.
DeepZoom Links are created using the clipboard copy button, above. Links now include relevant state values such as date and time, playing/paused status, duration, location, zoom, layers, weather and opacities, and tide station, buoy, or marker selected.
This makes it easy to share conditions at a particular location. Note that routes, tracks, and private markers are NOT included in the link.
To share these items, you’ll need to continue sharing a trip.
The goal here is to make sharing easier without the necessity of logging in, creating, naming, and saving a trip. In summary, there are now three methods of launching DeepZoom while specifying initial content:
Type
sample url
contents
where is it?
Trip
https://www.deepzoom.com/trip/dwmfjt2f
all routes, tracks, and private markers
Trips.Share
Marker
https://www.deepzoom.com/marker/GNIS1512376/0/
just select a marker
Copy Link on info tab dropdown
Clipboard
https://www.deepzoom.com/s/20250101-Gori7e5ZYP
most state except routes, tracks, and public markers
You can now get search results (links) for points of interest (POI) and major geographical locations like parks, towns, mountains, and airports within DeepZoom. Just click on the POI.
Search reults are advertising free and are provided by Brave Search. .gov and .org sites are prioritized. Unfortunately, Brave only filters search results to the country level (instead of state or some finer granularity), so there can be spurious results if the search text isn’t fairly unique.
Other new features
You can now change the trip departure date without time jumping back to the beginning of the first route.
When performing a location search, a marker is now automatically added.
Bug Fixes
You can now export and then import a DeepZoom trip in .gpx format with minimal loss of information.
Improved tide and current station click selection accuracy.
When editing documents, don’t follow links if they are clicked.
Reduced jitter of position marker when animating.
Reduced number of entries in the time zone list. Color coded entries for easy selection. Results of changing zones are updated in UI immediately.
Performance improvements.
Scripting
Script dialog wasn’t always setting the relative time properly.
Added a new event showDialog to scripting. Scripts can now programmatically open: trip-find, login, register, account, search, forgot-password, help, splash, about, demos, payday, add-public-markers, timebase, rate.
The selectMarker event now works with NDCB buoys and Wikipedia locations.
NDBC Buoys provide real time measurements of wind speed, water and air temperature, barometric pressure, and wave height.
DeepZoom now displays these on a separate layer which can be enabled or disabled on the Layers dialog. Data is automatically refreshed every 5 minutes.
Other new features
You can now use the search dialog to find tide and current stations.
Bug Fixes
Creating routes on touch devices has long been a bit flakey, with accidental double taps ending the route creation prematurely.
I’ve been trying to work around this bug in the Mapbox drawing component for years now and the problem seems to be finally fixed!
The gory details are here.
The Celsius selection on the Settings tab now actually does something.
DeepZoom would sometimes forget that you were logged in after a browser refresh.
If startup fails, prompt user to initiate refresh.
Trips saved with the Public option sometimes would not appear when searching using “Find Trips in this Area”.
This is a major update. New charts, new tides and currents, and plenty of UI improvements.
Charts
The lovely, traditional, hand-drawn NOAA charts featured artistically placed curving labels, a nice variety of fonts, and lots of annotations. In our mad rush to digitize the world, these charts are being phased out, and are being replaced by machine drawn vector charts which lack all of these attributes. With this release, we’ve accepted the inevitable and also adopted vector-based charts in DeepZoom.
But, a major benefit of the vector based charts is that a smooth land / water cutout can be established, allowing seamless transitions between NOAA (sea) and Mapbox (land) imagery. And instead of the confusing mix of depths in feet, fathoms, and sometimes meters, all NOAA charts now show depths in feet. Non USA charts still show depths in meters.
Tides
All NOAA tide and current stations have been updated to match the December 2023 (xtide) release.
UI
Fit and finish of the UI has significantly improved in this release.
Problems with editing routes on touchscreens are (hopefully) gone. Clicking on any object type (tide or current station, marker, private marker, route, track, or wikipedia) selects the object.
Add and edit routes and markers
At the top of the map are three new buttons.
Trip.New (trash, erase everything) is in the middle.
Add or edit routes and markers buttons are on the left and right, and they turn on edit mode.
Use the plus to add, or you can just edit existing markers or routes.
Use the arrows to quickly jump between already created routes and markers.
Edit the name, change color or icon, and jump to the details dialog to change route speed or departure date and time.
Close the routes/markers dialog to exit edit mode.
Tip! To quickly toggle between routes and markers click the “routes” or “markers” label in the upper left corner of the dialog.
Contribute public markers
A long term goal for DeepZoom is to become a public resource for detailed trip planning: a non-commercial, user-sourced map with ratings, comments, images, and videos.
Use the new “Add Public Markers” dialog to make contributions to the public map.
Contribute your private markers (previously saved in a trip) to the public map . Once added to the public map, you can still make changes to the marker, and of course, anyone can add comments.
Private markers appear larger on the map than public markers. So, after adding markers to the public map, if you reopen the trip containing the source markers they will exactly overlay the public markers, and appear larger.
If you wish to rename or reposition a public marker you have contributed, use the settings button on the info page.
Only a single definitive source for content (comments, images, videos) exists and is shown on both the private and public versions of a marker. If you reposition a private marker in your trip, the change will not automatically appear on the public map.
Routes
Routes can now be disabled. Disabled routes no longer have vertex points displayed, so this is a way to make boundaries, starting lines, and the like. Here’s an example: West Coast Crabber/Towboat Lanes
to add waypoints at the start and end of your route.
