Subsurface

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Fri, Sep 04, 2015 at 04:20:31PM +0100, Ken wrote:
> I have subsurface on my pc and it works v well. Far better than anything ever offered by Suunto that's for sure! I use a vyper. My thanks and congratulations to all involved.
> I was looking for a viewer I could use on my android phone (Samsung S4, jellybean). Not necessarily to add or modify dives, just to view an existing logbook. My thought was that after each log update on my pc i could bluetooth the relevant log file to my phone for viewing / discuss with fellow divers etc.
> I have downloaded subsurface for android to my phone but suddenly I need an account. I imagine this is for filesharing facilities eg Dropbox and the like. Thing is I neither have nor want any of my files ever on any cloud or any webstorage system, whatever name it may be called. Any files I want remote access to I keep on an iron key encrypted drive on me.
> So, what do I do? How do I get around this? 
> If there is no answer with subsurface can you recommend any other android software with which to view subsurface compatible files be they ssf or xml?

a) There is no Subsurface app for Android, yet. You must have downloaded a
daily build from our website, but that's entirely unsupported and simply
intended to make it easier for developers to see where we are

b) The simple answer to your question is no.
The complicated answer is... complicated.
Sure you could get the data onto your phone and keep it in sync with the
data on your laptop. Bluetooth is one possible way to do that.
Sure we could add the ability to open local files to the Android app.
But the user experience would be horrible and it would clutter the UI and
confuse people who want to just be able to get to their dives.
I know there are people who are very concerned about their privacy and
want control of their data. And then there are a billion people on
Facebook. And for the vast majority of people the ease of just storing
their data to the Subsurface cloud storage and seamlessly accessing it
on their Android device is a massive advantage.

c) If this is the way you want to go, you have the option of changing the
Android UI to add a way to open local files. This is not something I want
to expose to our normal users, though. But all the code is available and
you'd want to build your own app from source, anyway, to avoid any
backdoors or other nefarious activities.

/D

PS: If you want to ensure that no one accesses your data I strongly
recommend not to use any software where you have not read and understood
every single line of code. Then manually compile said software and only
use your manually compiled binaries. This includes the Android build on
your phone including the drivers for radio, graphics and camera, and of
course the firmware on your computer, plus the kernel and all libraries in
use.