When Auriga features sketching I will pay $50 for Styletap and try it on these Windows Mobile devices rather than purchasing a Palm. Until then PocketTopo with sketching maintains a significant advantage although the data entry and handling of Auriga is better. Any word Luc?
While I don't intend to value the respective merits of these PDA apps, I suspect they were developed with different goals, perhaps because they were introduced at different moments of the recent history of underground electronics in cave surveying.
In 2003, when I first released Auriga, underground PDA use was non-existent. While my initial goal was only to write a field-use coordinates calculator. It later evolved into providing a smart graphical rendition and data handling tool while underground or in the field. Since our expeditions involve several teams, many new caves, frequent connections and GPS use, I concentrated on input validation, loop handling (detection, report, display and closure) and data handling (search, merge and exchange) as well as GPS tracking. To us, these features were probably more needed than giving up paper. PocketTopo appeared in 2008, when cavers were more keen to use a PDA in caves, and its companion DistoX made splay shots very quick and convenient for sketching, so it's likely the focus was put more on sketching, and I think Beat did a good job at it. Now that I pretty much exhausted the other priorities I had, I plan to implement on-screen sketching into Auriga in 2010. Some tell me they'll never use it as they prefer paper, for its feel and better precision, but time will tell whether that picks up.
Regarding series, I agree with Martin Sluka that they're a great concept for managing passages. Unfortunately, being unsupported in most (if not all?) software except Toporobot, cavers instead hack the session concept (aka "surveys" in Compass) for this purpose, even though these were meant to manage teams, instruments and methods, not cave passages. Like assuming a passage is always mapped by a single team using the same instruments and methods.
Auriga can recognize series and handle them as passages (to transmit, color, show/hide, count/exclude them in map, stats, etc.) However, supporting series does not require to implement the "Toporobot rules". When I first worked on Martin Melzer's original Auriga code (43K!), I didn't even know these rules existed. I quickly replaced the numeric station names by alphanumeric ones to suit our naming scheme. Still, some caves imported into Auriga remained incomputable due to our disregard of these unknown rules (non-consecutive station names, no series beginnings, passages mapped from the end connecting to others mapped from the entrance, etc.) Eventually, I rewrote the computation algorithm to do away with any constraint on the way the survey data was assembled. Any cave with unique 12-character (or less) station names can now be computed by Auriga, with or without series, including caves with dive data, probably the most complicated case.
Regards,
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Luc Le Blanc
http://www.speleo.qc.ca/Auriga