µTide Homepage
Copyright ©2008 Jörn Eichler
Copyright ©1998 David Flater (for XTide)
Overview
Please note:
I got several requests about stations not included in the
available packages. The problem is, that I cannot
provide any locations when there is no written permission from the
copyright owner available. Please see also the
FAQ section of
XTide.
Disclaimer
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. The author
assumes no liability for damages arising from use of this program
OR of any 'harmonics data' that might be distributed with it.
For details, see the appended GNU
General Public License.
NOT FOR NAVIGATION!
License
This software is provided under the terms of the GNU
General Public License,
either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
What is it?
µTide is a small port of
XTide
by David Flater to the J2ME platform.
It is meant to run on modern cell phones.
However, it does quite a lot of floating point calculations, and thus
will probably
not run on slower phones
(e.g. Motorola RAZR V3).
This program is beta. I tried to put in as few bugs as possible. But
if you find one, please tell me... :-)
Restrictions
µTide implements a subset of
XTide's function.
What it does:
- it calculates high and low tide times for a given station and
day.
There are several different data sets available. They all
go as separate jar-files and thus will be available as separate
applications. But installing more than one at a time is possible.
- it shows a tide graph for a given day.
- it supports reference stations and derived stations for which data
is available in XTide format.
What it does not:
- it does not know about daylight saving time
As far as I know, j2me devices need only to implement the GMT
timezone. So there is no guarantee that all timezones needed by
µTide will be accessible on all phones. I thus decided
not to implement a DST handling. The user will have to tell
the program if the current location uses DST.
- it does not support 'currents stations'
As of now, µTide only does max and min
tide event calculation.
It doesn't do slack and mark events which would be
neccessary for calculating 'currents stations'
- I could not figure out how to handle special characters
like German umlauts and Frensh accent signs and the special
characters of Iceland. Attempting to
read them in always crashed the application. So I replaced them with
standard ASCII characters. Probably the replacements for the Icelandic
special characters are inapropriate. But I just don't know
the correct substitutions.
If you encounter problems here, tell me.
- µTide does all calculation using meters. It can however
show the results in feet as well. This can be set on the
main screen. As µTide does not know about the default units of
a station, you will always get the units you specified.
- the latitude/longitude values of the locations are currently not
included in the database files.
It is therefore not possible to look for a closest location.
Screenshots
These screenshots were taken from the emulator running on linux. Actual cell
phones will look slightly different.
 |
 |
| The main screen |
Tide calculations |
The main screen
- select a station
- select calculation date
- specify daylight saving time or standard time
at the selected location.
- select output units and time format (24h / 12h)
- You can look up a station with a substring search (menu item).
This will cycle through all matching stations when called
repeatedly.
Supported devices
Generally speaking, µTide should work on any J2ME
device providing MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1.
But it relys on a decent floating point calculation performance which
makes it virtually unusable on slow phones.
As I only have very limited access to different cell phone models, the
following list is quite short...
If your phone is not listed, that
does not mean µTide won't run. If you think your phone has a fast
enough processor, try it and please tell me if it worked, so we can increment
the list.
Phones known to work:
- Motorola MOTO U9
- Nokia 5310
- Nokia 6085
- Nokia 6120classic
- Nokia 6288
- Nokia 6300
- Nokia 6555
- Nokia E50
- Nokia E65
- Nokia E71
- Nokia N73
- Nokia N95
- Orange SPV 650
- Samsung A412
- Sony Ericsson K510i
- Sony Ericsson K800i
- Sony Ericsson W380i
- Sony Ericsson W810i
Known problems:
- I was told, that µTide would not install (Message: 907 Jar Error)
on a Blackberry 7130.
If any Blackberry user finds a way of successfully installing
µTide or has any idea how to solve the problem, please tell me.
As I don't have access to Blackberry devices, I don't know how to
get around this problem.
However, if you only need stations in the U.S. you can consider using
Tideberry.
Available packages
Until now there are eight different data sets available covering a
total of 4044 locations.
Please read the legal notices from XTide homepage
concerning the harmonic data sets!
The free data set had to be split up into several parts, because it
contains so many derived stations, that the list would have become
to long to be usable on cell phones.
Some more (older) data from
Bob Kenney's web site:
- muTide_OCE.jar:
all reference stations and derived stations of the
harmonics.tcd.gz data set of
XTide
covering Oceania
(Long>62° and Lat<-2°)
(See station list
of this file)
Size of this jar: 106 KB
Download:
jad
jar
- muTide_SA.jar:
all reference stations and derived stations of the
harmonics.tcd.gz data set of
XTide
covering South America (mostly Brazilian stations)
(See station list
of this file)
Size of this jar: 30 KB
Download:
jad
jar
Sourcecode
The source consists of two parts:
- the µTide j2mewtk source tree containing all
files to build
muTide_NF.jar
.
The resulting jar contains the two files data.dat
and stations.dat
which are produced by
- the Harmonics.java converter which takes .txt and .xml
files (the older XTide format) and produces the data for µTide.
See README files of the source for more information.
Download:
µTide soure,
Converter source
last edited 08.07.2010 — Jörn Eichler (joerneichler@gmx.net)