1.1 New and noteworthy
Product updates
Jan 13, 2025
A big SeaPeople update has launched and we can't wait for you to experience all the new features and improvements we've added. Check out he key areas where we have made massive improvements:
Hails - Map visibility, creating hails anywhere, hail expirations.
Why: Hails are the most effective way of getting help and helping others.
Hails now show on the Explore map at the location of the hail and how many people are in the hail. You can browse them in context. It also means you can answer questions from anyone around the world!
Hails can be created at a different location than your current one. This means that you can create a hail at your next anchorage or at the yard where you're boat is stored. However, only those in the hail radius will receive a notification.
Hails expire and go away if you haven't joined it. Hails are meant to be lightweight and used often just like a better version of VHF. But that means that we can't have hails linger around that are old and stale. You can pick the expiry time when you create a hail and you can manually expire a hail by going into the hail settings page. Remember, the expiration of a hail only has to do with the hails discoverability by others. Any hail you joined will remain in your chat thread after expiration.
Groups: Discussion groups and verified groups for bonafide clubs.
Why: Discussion groups right in the app provide super easy ways to learn & share, build connections, and stay engaged.
Anyone can create a great discussion group, but you'll need approval for the group to be verified. Verified groups can have additional media associated with them and we will boast in group search results.
Posts can be added to groups and discussions in comments around those topics. If you joined a group, the group posts appear in your "Following" feed so that it's easy to keep up to date.
Groups can be location based (eg, sailing club in Ottawa) or be global (eg, Balance Catamarans). And you can search for groups by name and location.
To organize regattas or races, you can also see all the people from a group on the map. Which makes it easy to find out where your members are located.
Tracking: Privacy controls, crew shared trips, stats, and track editing.
Why: Give you full control over the accuracy of the trips you log
You can add crew to your trip and the trip will appear in their logbook. By default, the crew on your boat will be added to all trips but you can also edit the crew on each trip individually after the fact. This also means that crew will get miles accredited for the trip.
The server track has been removed and a new track is created for every tracking session. It has been replaced with an interactive trip map where you can easily browser all the tracks and trips for a user. You can also see the location on the globe that their trips took place.
For the not-fully-social, you can save a trip silently by using "End & save" on the tracking page. The trip will appear in your logbook but none of your followers will get a notification and it won't post to the social feeds.
It's your track, so you can edit it anytime and add to the start or edit. This is especially useful if you forget to start or stop tracking. And it's a good way to adjust the distance exactly as you want.
For the pirates, you can save a trip as private and no one will see it expect for the crew on your boat.
Moving time is now calculate separately than the trip time. This makes the avg speed a lot more accurate for all your trips. In addition, we show the max speed for the trip while the current speed is shown below your boat on the tracking map.
Trip statistics are tracked and shown on your profile.
Crew on trips have trip statistics attributed to them even if they didn't track themselves.
It's possible to exclude trips from the statistics calculation. This is useful as many people will draw future/past trip summaries of trips they already have all segments posted and don't want the drawn trips to be included in stats.
[Plus only] You can see monthly stats about your travels (max/avg speed, time on water, distance)
Live trips - In the app and on the web.
Why: Encourage sharing and connecting while travelling and not just at the end.
Live trip cards now show for all the people you follow that are tracking. This means you can kudo and comment on their trip while they are underway. No need to wait for a trip to end to chat! When the tracking session completes, all the comments and kudos are moved to the resulting logbook entry.
[Plus only] While tracking you can share a web page to make it easy for family and friends to follow your adventure. The web view has integrated weather (wind, waves, currents) so that those following your adventures know your current weather and the weather coming up in the next few days.
Subscriptions
Why: This is our full time job!
SeaPeople will adopt a standard freemium model as we begin and continue to release feature additions and elevated experiences within the app. A freemium approach allows users to enjoy most of SeaPeople for free; providing ways to connect and communicate with nearby boaters, as well as track and log trips. Enhanced features will require a paid plan. SeaPeople was built by boaters, for boaters, and we hope the features we place in premium plans will bring value to your life on the water or allow you to cancel hardware based subscriptions; saving you money. Stick with us on the journey. We'll treat you, your time, your data, and your wallet the way we would want to be treated.
Minor improvements include:
Images and videos now take 80% less bandwidth while viewing. So it's both faster and takes less bandwidth.
If you're on a capped internet plan, you can turn off videos from automatically displaying and downloading. In your settings turn on 'Lower image/video quality' mode.
Improvements to how blocked users are handled. There's a new section to manage blocked users and blocked users will be removed from the map and feed.
You can search by username only by starting a search with
@. And usernames are shown in the UI in every user card.People you follow will always now return at the top of all your search results.
[Plus only] We've increased the length of videos and number of images you can upload.