...And here's some random thoughts so far.

The tutorial is written for tech folks. There isn't anything wrong with that, it's just that I had to stumble thru a few steps to figure things out. If anyone says it isn't written for tech folks, well then you're a tech folk cause I had some problems.

I have a Humminbird 998. I have been recording data onto a SD card. At first I just yanked the card out of the sd slot in the head unit and plugged it into a card reader. No .gpx files or .ht files. With an internet search and some reading on a different message board I found I needed to save files on the Humminbird head unit. So I did. Still no .gpx or .ht files but I have .DAT files and they worked. Nothing in the tutorial about how to save data or how to get .gpx or .ht files.

I've built three maps. Or should I say I've built three partial maps, I need to collect more data. Not the software's fault and it gives me an excuse to get out and do more fishing.

Making the shoreline border with Google Earth was very easy and intuitive. Why RM doesn't default to 'shoreline' instead of 'island' is beyond me, and is annoying. Just a FYI.

I'm sure there is a reason, but what is the difference between a 'workspace' and a 'project'? I'm treating them as the same, just one as an extension of the other and it seems redundant.

I transported nearly 5 gig of data from the sd card to my HDD. It wasn't labeled and was a nightmare to sift thru to separate data from one lake to the next. Thank goodness the dates are there from when I saved the tracks so I could transfer all the tracks from one date into a project... or workspace.

Just some very random thoughts. Despite the lack of intuitiveness, I am still looking forward using RM for a long time to come.

Hi Gimper,
Thanks for the feedback.

The default to shoreline is simply because there can only be one shoreline, but possible many islands. We have users with over 100 islands in a single map project, and if they are all imported at once then changing those back to island (from shoreline) is a lot more work than changing the single shoreline. I agree that it can be confusing, especially when you have just a shoreline, and we could probably think of a better way to do this - perhaps an option during import as to what the default should be.

A Workspace can hold any number of projects, and also other other stuff, such as tracks, user maps (edited maps) and waypoints, which aren't themselves members of a project. It does add another layer of complexity, and I know its not the way that other mapping programs such as DrDepth work, but it is also quite a powerful difference.

I think once you get familiarised with the ReefMaster workflow most of these things will become second nature, and it sounds like you are getting there!

Matt