DreamDives helped people log their dive experiences. The company used the technology of its day to do it, building dive logging into all-in-one solutions for desktop computers and the handheld devices divers were starting to carry.
It was founded in 2002 in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, and grew to supply a market spread across the world — largely through the shareware and download channels that were how small software companies reached an international audience before app stores existed.
The company mission
DreamDives' stated vision was to empower people through high-quality dive logging software products that enable the exchange of dive information between different computing platforms.
That last clause is the interesting part, and it explains a lot about the product range. The company's central problem was never really "how do we store a dive?" — it was "how do we move a dive between a handheld, a desktop and a dive computer without losing anything?" DiveSync, the DCU import modules and the VDAF planning format were all attempts on that same problem from different sides.
How the company worked
DreamDives described itself as still quite small, with a family feel — international in outlook but informal in the way it did things. It was the shape a great many independent software vendors took in the 2000s: a handful of people, a product with more depth than its market share suggested, and a direct relationship with an enthusiastic and quite demanding user base.
That directness showed in the product. SharkPoint's willingness to add fields for things most dive logs ignored, and its insistence that customisation be visual rather than technical, reads like software shaped by the people who used it rather than by a specification written in advance.
The products
The range settled into a consistent shape: one logbook published for Windows, PocketPC and Palm OS; DiveSync to move data between them; the DCU modules to bring dive computer profiles in; and Scububble, a shared online database of dive sites that logbooks could draw on. The full list is on the products page.
What happened
The last product news DreamDives published dates from 2009 — a Windows 7 installer and, before it, a PocketPC update in December 2008. The platforms the handheld editions depended on were retired by their own vendors not long after, and the company did not follow the range on to what replaced them.
DreamDives no longer trades and SharkPoint is no longer distributed. These pages remain as a record of the software and of the company that built it, alongside the reference material that outlasted both.
The news archive covers what was announced along the way.