What's the best diving app you've actually used? We got fed up with ours and built one, so I'm curious what I'm up against.
Full disclosure before anything else: I'm one of the two people who built this, so treat this as a "here's my thing, tell me if it's stupid" post rather than a review. Mods, remove it if it breaks the rules.
The backstory is boring but true.
My friend Daniele and I were diving in Egypt, and we were on different computers.
Between us we'd used the Oceanic app, Suunto, and a couple of the generic logbook apps, and during a surface interval we started listing everything we wished those apps did. The list got long enough that we decided to just build it ourselves.
What ended up in it:
- Dive profiles from the computer (supporting hundreds of them), plus manual entry
- Photos and video attached to the dive itself
- Marine life logging: what you saw, where you saw it, on which dive
- A dive site database with the stuff you actually want before you splash: depth range, entry, currents, level, what's down there
- A social layer, so buddies and trips aren't just a solo diary
- One tap colour correction for photos and video shot on a phone
On that last point, spoiler: I shoot professionally and I live in Lightroom.
But after a dive I don't want to open Lightroom just to send my friends a photo of the turtle. So I wrote the correction algorithm myself, coming at it from both the mobile app side and the post processing side. It reads the content of the shot and adapts, instead of slapping the same "kill all blue" preset on everything, and it tries to recover what the water ate. It won't beat a manual grade. For the ride back to the boat, it's plenty.
The part I care most about is the marine life data. Birders solved this years ago: casual sightings logged in an app turned into a genuine research dataset. Recreational divers are already in the water looking at exactly the species researchers want counted, and almost none of that gets recorded anywhere useful. Every sighting logged in SeaLog is species, site, date, depth, which is the shape citizen science needs. The goal is to make that dataset actually usable for marine research and conservation, and to build a community that treats logging as something bigger than personal record keeping.
Site is here if you want to look: https://sealog.life
What I'd genuinely like from you:
- Does this solve a real problem, or one only the two of us have?
- What do you log with today, and what keeps you there? Paper counts as a valid answer.
- If you've switched apps before, what made you leave the old one?
- On marine life: would you actually log sightings if the data fed research, or is that a "great idea, never gonna do it" feature?
Roast it if it deserves roasting. That's more useful to me than polite enthusiasm.