Welcome to the English pages of DreamDives. This is where the SharkPoint dive logbook range is documented — what each edition did, what it ran on, and how the pieces fitted together.
SharkPoint was a professional and recreational scuba dive logbook that went a long way past recording depth, time and a scribbled note. It was built for divers who keep a log seriously: instructors and divemasters with hundreds of entries to organise, technical divers tracking gas and equipment, underwater photographers tying images to sites, and recreational divers who simply wanted their history in one place and legible.
The idea behind it
Most dive log software of the period assumed every diver wanted the same fields in the same order. SharkPoint assumed the opposite. Its customisation was visual — no scripting, no database knowledge — and it let the diver decide what to track and how to see it. A novice logging six holiday dives a year and a search-and-rescue diver logging operational detail could use the same program without either being forced into the other's shape.
Underneath, it ran on a real database engine rather than a flat file, which is what made the statistics, the searching and the record linking possible at all.
Choosing an edition
| Edition | Platform | Role |
|---|---|---|
| SharkPoint for Windows | Windows desktop | The full logbook: statistics, print design, dive computer import |
| SharkPoint for PocketPC | PocketPC / Windows Mobile | Logging at the dive site, same look and feel as the desktop |
| SharkPoint for Palm | Palm OS | The original handheld companion |
| DualPack (Palm & Windows) | Both | Handheld plus desktop with DiveSync |
| DualPack (PocketPC & Windows) | Both | The version 2 suite, with DiveSync v2 |
| SharkPoint DCU | Windows add-on | Dive computer profile import |
Getting the log off the boat and onto the desktop
The handheld and desktop editions were not two separate products with two separate logbooks. DiveSync moved the data between them, so a dive typed into a PDA between surface intervals was on the desktop the same evening, where it could be edited in detail, analysed properly and printed. The version 2 generation, DiveSync Next Gen, synchronised the complete dataset rather than a subset.
Dive sites, tagged where they actually are
With a handheld GPS unit connected — Bluetooth, serial, internal or USB — SharkPoint could record the co-ordinates of a dive site to within a few tens of feet and keep them attached to the dive place record. Those co-ordinates could then be used with the Windows edition's mapping features or exported for viewing in a mapping application. For background on what civilian GPS accuracy actually means in practice, the official US government GPS accuracy pages are the plain-language reference.
Where the useful reading is now
SharkPoint is no longer distributed and DreamDives no longer trades, but a fair amount of what these pages cover is not version-specific. If you are setting up any digital dive log today, the pages worth reading are what belongs in a dive log, which walks through the fields and why each one earns its place, and dive computer imports and log file formats, which explains how profile downloads work and why logbook portability matters more than any single program.
For the story of the company itself, see about DreamDives. For the shared dive-site database that ran alongside the software, see Scububble.