Allan Cazaly wrote: > I have just checked my two links for Canal Planner. > One link doesn't seem to work but this address does: > > <http://canalplan.tty.org.uk/cgi-bin/canal.cgi> > > It worked for me this morning (14th) > > Hope this helps, ~Allan~ PS:(Please confirm if you are successful). I need to > know for inclusion in my Information Canal Book - Thanks!
Here's the definitive - right from the horses mouth as it were - statement. Firstly, and vitally, although they resolve into other things, please always use the main domain addresses for CanalPlanAC. That's "canalplan.org.uk" and "canalplan.eu". You'll find that at the moment they both give you the same thing (more on that later). The first of those - canalplan.org.uk - will point to the best version available at the moment. This has been the version you all know (version 8). However that version is almost impossible to maintain. The second - canalplan.eu - will point you to a hopefully fairly stable but more experimental release of the new version (version 9). This is much better structured, uses a real database, and can do a lot of things that version 8 can't (including - hence the name - supporting waterways outside mainland England: there aren't any in yet, but work is going in that direction) but can't quite do everything that version 8 can, particularly as regards maps. It's a much more modern layout, much more configurable and interactive, and is designed so that it can fairly easily be translated into other languages and given a skin for mobile devices. That's being work on and when I think that this is the best version - which is not that far in the future - then version 8 will be retired. At that stage I'll make a decision as to whether to still have a "stable release" and "development" versions or whether to just have the one. Note that I'm talking about versions of the software here. There is the then the question of the machine that runs them. These are currently hosted on different machines. At the time of writing the machine that hosts version 8 is down, and so I've redirected both addresses to point at the machine running version 9. That's a very good reason why you should use the "canalplan.org.uk" and "canalplan.eu" URLs to find them - not the URLs on the machines that are hosting them. That lets me move them around, cope with system downtime etc. To return to the original question about the downloadable version, however, I produced it after a lot of public pressure, but never really liked it. One problem was that I was constantly having to deal with installation problems and - of course - I'm always having to chase the latest version of Windows. That's not what I want to do in my (limited) free time - I'd rather put the effort into making the application better. I don't even have a machine running Windows in the house, so a new version is highly unlikely. Sorry! I'm still actively developing CanalPlan - you can see the way it's going at canalplan.eu - but it's going to be as an entirely on-line application from now on. The development one gets a fair bit of testing on mobile devices, and I'm really interested in your thoughts as to how to make it work best on them. Hope this helps - I'll keep looking here for comments. Feel free to copy and post any of this information anywhere you see people asking - I can't keep up with all the waterways information sources these days! Nick
