What's New in Zora

Your Screens Follow You Aboard

September 2026

Every crew member now has a station of their own, named after them, and logging in on any display takes you to it. Lay out the chart table the way you like it once and it looks the same at the helm and on the tablet. The browser remembers nothing about stations any more, so a mini PC that restarts no longer drops back to the default screens.

Switching station has moved to the user drawer. Tap the user button and Station is the first row. Pick a shared station such as Helm for the rest of the watch, and the next login takes you back to your own. Shared stations are created, renamed and deleted from the same list.

• A new station starts from the default's. Each Dynamic Navigation state shows the default station's layout until you save that state at the new station, and Import from default under Add screen copies the default's custom screens across.
• The Data tab lists and logbook templates come from the default until a station saves its own.
• A switch changes the whole screen at once, layouts and Data tab lists, without a reload.
• The edit bar names the station rather than showing its internal id, and deleting a station now says plainly that its screens and settings cannot be restored.

Safer Defaults

September 2026

• A new screen sounds its alarms. Information, warning and alarm sounds start switched on. A screen used to start silent until someone found the buttons.
• The watch timer calls you with a dialog open. If it reached zero behind an open dialog it used to count on in silence.
• Restart, reboot and shut down ask first. One stray tap on shut down used to leave Zora off until the power was cycled at the supply.
• One bad GPS fix no longer sets off the anchor alarm. The drag distance is properly smoothed, so a single outlier moves it a tenth of the way instead of almost all of it. Mooring gets the same fix.
• Distress calls read the longitude as east or west. A western longitude used to be read out as south.
• The holding screen says where the anchor goes: ahead of the boat along its heading, at the swing radius your chain and depth give, or at the boat's own position with no heading.

Racing Belongs to the Boat

September 2026

A race used to live on whichever display started it. The boat runs it now. The start gun, the course and the moment the race begins are held on the main unit, so every display shows the same countdown and one that restarts mid-sequence picks it up where it is. The dedicated Regatta screen is gone: racing happens on the chart and the Dynamic Navigation screen like any other passage.

One door in, and a way out that is always there. A route's details carry a regatta / route toggle that decides what start does. A route with no lines opens the line editor instead, where each line is set by its committee boat and pin ends, tapped on the chart or typed in. The drawer under the regatta bar holds the exit, so a race can be ended from any layout, with or without the Start Timer widget.

• The regatta bar is the route bar. Same place, same shape, one bar to learn. Before the gun it shows how early or late your present course puts you, big and in the middle: early is over the line at the gun and reads red, up to five seconds late reads green.
• Start now is on the bar, and the gun presets sit in its drawer.
• The start line is green and the finish red, named at their ends in text that runs along the line and scales with the zoom.
• Stopping ends the race. Heading in to anchor, moor or dock with a route running asks Stop route?, and during a race that answer ends the race with it.

Routes, Tracks and Laylines

September 2026

• The route and track lists sort by distance, to the boat or to the map, and tracks get the same filter tabs as routes.
• The route bar reads at full size: COG, VMG, BTW and DTW on one line, with the cross-track distance labelled XTD and shown from 5 m.
• The chart draws the suggested path to the mark when Zora's routing advises a tack, following the call rather than guessing from your course over ground. A layline not yet confirmed by measurement is drawn dashed, whatever line style you chose.
• The route tool remembers the route you had open when the tools drawer closes.

A Quieter Ticker

September 2026

• A group takes one slot in the ticker. A dozen maintenance jobs falling due used to fill the top of the chart for a minute. Now the group shows once, with its counts, in the colour of its most urgent member.
• Equipment that drops off the bus is grouped too, badged offline and then back online, rather than one line per box when a backbone goes down.
• Routine notes wait while you sail. Maintenance, tasks and offline equipment stay at normal while the boat is underway, unless an Equipment screen is showing. Alarms and emergencies are never held back.

Zora Chases Your Maintenance

September 2026

Your maintenance schedule speaks up now. A job coming due raises a note in the ticker and the report list naming the equipment and the task, and tapping it opens that item's maintenance screen. Notes were raised before and never shown: they went somewhere nothing on screen was reading, so no boat has ever seen one.

The warning comes before the job is owed, about three-quarters of the way through the interval, which is the same point the maintenance screen's progress bar turns amber. That is the difference between ordering a part in time and finding out on the day. When the job is genuinely owed the same note hardens into a warning rather than adding a second one.

• One note per task. Two jobs falling due on the same engine no longer overwrite each other, which is how one of them used to vanish.
• Starting the work silences it. Move the card to In Progress and the note clears; move it back to Todo and the note returns.
• Queueing a job early stops the reminder. Raising a card from a task's own menu clears that task's advance note, instead of going on about work you have already put on the board.
• A raised card arrives with a deadline and a reason — a Done date a week out, and a line in the card's own log saying it exists because the task fell due. Change that date in the card editor, or clear it where the job is not on a clock.
• A late card chases you. Any card sitting past its Done date raises a note of its own, hand-written ones included, and it clears when the card reaches Done.
• Declining the service reset no longer loses the job. Moving a card to Done asks whether to reset the interval. Answer no and the card returns to In Progress, rather than closing with no service recorded and a duplicate card appearing behind it.
• A monthly interval anchored to the 31st stays anchored. Intervals set on a 29th, 30th or 31st crept a few days further forward every time they renewed.
• Decommissioned equipment goes quiet, on the due notes and the late-card notes alike.

One Timeline for All Weather

September 2026

Weather used to carry eleven timelines, one for each parameter, each with its own period and its own frequency. There is one now. Choose how far ahead you want to look, once, and that choice holds while you move between wind, pressure, waves and the rest instead of the timeline rebuilding itself every time you switch.

The frequency control has gone, and the step is set for you — hourly out to 24 hours, then three-hourly to the five-day horizon. The timeline also starts at the present rather than at the forecast run's base time, so no frame you are offered is already behind you.

• The days are written under the scale, one band per calendar day in your own time rather than UTC, running the full width of the screen. A dot on the bar marks the present, and the time cursor sits down on the day row where it can be found without hunting for it.
• One Weather dialog in the chart's tool panel now holds the forecast period and the parameter list, in place of the settings that opened per parameter. Tapping a tile switches that parameter on; press and hold a tile to reach how it is drawn.
• The chip above the timeline names the model you are reading, even when the boat holds only one. Tap it to cycle through the models you have for that parameter.
• The layer settings are bars over the chart instead of a card: what is drawn, how strongly, and which model it comes from, dismissed by the control that opened them.
• Wind Flow is one control, in the same place whatever you are looking at. It used to change icon and change position depending on the parameter underneath it.
• Place names have a switch again on the weather widget, under the opacity bar. The button that reset the draw settings to factory has gone.
• The forecast keeps itself aboard. A switch in the dialog downloads your selection in the background and refreshes it as new model runs come out, so the weather is on the boat when the link is not. The parameter list there is what the boat downloads; what a screen draws is still the tile's own switch.
• The overlay no longer flashes about once a second while your boat position is locked.
• Scrubbing back over frames you have just seen draws them from what is held rather than decoding them a second time.

One Keyboard, Wherever You Are Typing

September 2026

Every form used to carry a keyboard of its own. There is one now. Open it with the keyboard icon in a form's footer and it stays up, pinned across the bottom of the screen: touch a field anywhere in the app and the keys type into that one.

The green Save and red Cancel keys are gone from the keyboard. Commit or abandon an edit with the form's own Save and Cancel buttons, which now stay on screen while you type instead of being swapped out for the keys. If your hand goes to the green key out of habit, that is the one thing to unlearn.

• The iPad layout, key for key. Three pages rather than two: letters, then digits with the punctuation you use most, then the rarer symbols. The flip keys sit bottom-left where your thumb already is, and each one names the page it takes you to. A degree key has a cell of its own, for bearings, latitudes and wind angles.
• Left and right caret keys. A typo in the middle of a word is a correction now instead of a wipe and retype. Placing a caret with a fingertip in a small field on a helm screen has never worked well.
• Tab moves to the next field on the form you are filling in.
• Number fields open on the number pad, and the key click sounds as the key goes down rather than when the character lands.
• The chart's alarm-limit editor brings the number pad up with it, since typing is the whole of that form. It also checks the two limits against each other, so a low limit above the high one is refused rather than saved.
• It never opens by itself. A helm screen may have a real keyboard plugged into it and nothing aboard can tell, so whether ours is up stays your decision.

Passage Planning on the Chart

August 2026

Four new overlays sit under Pilots & Tides, and none of them need a connection. Zora downloads the world data once and serves it from the boat.

• Pilot charts give you the month-by-month picture of a passage. Pick a month and the chart draws its wind roses; surface current comes as streamlines on a separate toggle, so you can have one without the other. Tap a rose or a cell and its numbers open in the INFO tab.
• Tidal streams are drawn from a global tidal-current atlas, so you can see which way the water is setting before you commit to a passage.
• Tropical storm history draws the recorded tracks of past cyclones. This is history rather than a forecast: it tells you which waters have seen storms at this time of year, and the paths they took.
• Magnetic variation shows the variation across the chart, so you can read the difference between true and magnetic where you are instead of looking it up.

The Chart's Tool Panel

August 2026

Buttons in the Overlays and Navigation panels now sit pressed in while their layer is on, so you can tell what is switched on from the shape of a button and not only from its colour. That matters most at night, when the palette changes and colour is the first thing to go.

Weather and radar controls have moved into the chart's own tool panel rather than each opening a drawer of its own.

AIS and Radar Widgets

August 2026

Both scopes now carry the same centre and zoom rail as the satellite map, and both can be dragged. Pull the scope to see further ahead, or out to one side, then press the centre button to bring your boat back to the middle. The drag is clamped to the edge of the scope, so you cannot pull everything out of view and lose your bearings.

On radar, zoom steps the antenna's own range through the values your radar publishes rather than an arbitrary amount. Opening the screen no longer wakes a radar you left in standby, either: only a deliberate tap on the view toggle puts the antenna back on air.

The AIS scope has gained a legend, and a drag on it no longer opens the tools by accident.

The Weather Map

August 2026

Weather is a widget of its own now, split out from the chart, so you can give it a screen instead of borrowing the chart's. Wind draws over every layer rather than only its own, and you can switch the particles off when you want to read what is underneath them. Place names are a toggle, and the widget names itself in its top-left corner so you can tell which is which on a screen carrying several.

The forecasts are our own now, drawn from the models the boat carries rather than from a third party's map.

Trackers

August 2026

Add a SPOT tracker in Setup and it appears on the chart as a waypoint-style pin, with the Trackers tool listing everything you are following and an info card behind each one. It is for the things that leave the boat without you: a dinghy, an outboard, a kayak. A boat with no tracker never sees the tool at all.

Replay a Trip on the 3D Satellite Map

August & September 2026

Play a trip back and watch it as it happened. The track runs over satellite imagery with real terrain beneath it, so the coast you sailed past stands up on the screen rather than lying flat, and the wind rose replays alongside the boat, turning to the wind you actually had at each point of the passage.

The satellite map has also gained a centre and zoom rail, and the navigation chart can now show satellite imagery as a layer of its own.

The Trip List

August 2026

The Journal's trips are a list you work down rather than a strip of tabs, and each card carries a five-star rating and the flags of the countries that trip passed through. The chart's Tracks open in the same tool, so a recorded track and the trip it belongs to are one thing instead of two.

Tides From Real Gauges

August 2026

Zora now carries the harmonics of nearly 3,000 real tide gauges alongside the global tide model it already used. In most harbours and estuaries you are close enough to one of them, so your tide comes from that gauge's own measured behaviour rather than a worldwide average.

The difference is largest where it matters most. A global model does badly in funnels and narrow inlets: at the worst station we checked, it was out by nearly the whole tidal range, while the gauge harmonics landed within a few centimetres. Across 79 stations checked against published predictions, the gauge data was the closer of the two at 78 of them.

• Tide stations appear on the chart, showing which way the water is going and how high, so you can see which gauge is feeding your reading.
• Press anywhere for a tide. Zora reads the tide at the position you pressed rather than only at a station.
• The pin says who answered. Where a real gauge stood in for the spot you asked about, the chip tells you which gauge it was and how far away.

None of this needs a connection. The gauges and the model both live on the boat, with no account to set up and no data allowance to spend.

Your Boat's Own Polar Diagram

August 2026

Zora now builds your polar diagram from the way your boat actually sails. It records your sailing as you go and fits the diagram from those records, so the numbers are yours, in your conditions, rather than a table copied from a brochure. The more miles you put in, the more of the diagram fills in.

Recording runs on its own, whether or not you ever open the diagram. It is also the groundwork for weather and performance routing: the miles you sail now are the data those passage plans will be built on, which is worth knowing before you decide how carefully to keep your sail plan up to date.

Tell Zora about a sail change before you make it on deck. Zora has no sensor on your sails, so it files your performance under whichever sail plan you have declared. Reef first and tell it afterwards, and the reefed numbers land under your full-sail plan, which then reads slower than your boat really is. Declare the change in Zora, then go and do it. Zora stops recording for five minutes after you declare it, so the work on deck stays out of the table.

• A Polar Diagram widget you can put on any screen.
• Polar history, for looking back at how you sailed.
• A performance arc on the wind rose, showing how close you are to what your boat has already shown it can do.

Routes

August 2026

• The cross-track corridor is drawn on the chart, and how strongly it shows is yours to set. Its alarm settings sit with it.
• Arrival times and distances come from the navigation service rather than being worked out twice in different places, so what the route panel says and what the chart says agree.
• The route behind you stays on the chart, drawn faint, so you can see where you have come from without it competing with the leg you are on.
• Passage progress shows how far through the route you are.
• The active route has a card in the Info tab, so you can read it without leaving what you were looking at.

Person Overboard

August 2026

You can now declare more than one person overboard. Until now a second press was quietly ignored while the first was still live, which is exactly the wrong behaviour when two people go over.

Claims made within a quarter of a mile of each other are bracketed under a header. Confirming that header is the crew's way of saying "this is one person, reported three times" — Zora never merges on its own, because two people who went over together are metres apart and look identical to one person reported twice. Each row carries a radio button, so which casualty the boat is steering to is visible on every row rather than hidden. A POB can be cancelled, and the whole declaration is stored on the boat rather than living only on the screen that raised it.

The groundwork for personal AIS beacons is in place, so a crew member's own beacon will be able to raise the same declaration.

Alarms

August 2026

• Arm and disarm alarms by group. Groups are named, and your choice sticks across restarts, so silencing a set of alarms while you are alongside does not mean silencing them again every time you switch on.
• Alarms can reach you off the boat. Reports are delivered to the cloud with retries, so an alarm raised while the link is down is not lost when the link returns.
• Which channel an alarm uses is set per alarm, rather than being decided by how severe it is.
• The report list runs newest first, and any row can be shelved whether or not you have acknowledged it.
• Spoken alerts have an all-clear sound and an announcement when the system is ready. If a USB speaker is configured but not plugged in, Zora says so at startup instead of failing silently.

Your Tank and Battery Alarm Levels Are Watched

September 2026

The warning levels you set on a tank, a battery, an engine, an inverter or a solar panel now raise an alarm when a reading crosses one. Until now they were saved and nothing read them, so a diesel tank carrying 40, 30 and 20 percent bands emptied without a word.

Nothing needs re-entering. A boat already carrying levels gets its alarms from the levels as they stand.

Set your levels, then restart Zora. The alarms are built as Zora starts, so a level you set today begins watching at the next start. Nothing on screen confirms the alarm was built yet, so that restart is also how you know it took.

Zora Picks Your Best GPS

September 2026

Boats often carry more than one receiver: a dedicated antenna, plus whatever is built into the VHF and the AIS. Zora now sorts them out on its own. A receiver is ranked as soon as it appears, a dedicated antenna ahead of one buried inside another instrument, and the order survives reboots and updates.

If the receiver you are on loses its fix or its accuracy falls away, Zora moves you to the next best one and says so: which unit dropped, which took over, and what it measured. That warning has no timeout. A boat that failed over to its backup antenna at two in the morning is still saying so at breakfast, instead of the message quietly ageing out overnight.

There is also a Reassess button that rebuilds the order from whatever is publishing now, useful after you add hardware or on a boat whose order no longer matches what is aboard. Zora will not reorder a list you arranged yourself unless you ask it to.

Zora Finds Your Equipment

August 2026

Your autopilot announces its brand, model and serial number on the network. Zora now reads that and fills the asset in for you, rather than leaving you to type it, or to live with something called "new Autopilot Item" and an empty Info tab. The autopilot add-on card in Setup is gone, because detection is automatic.

Switching, engines and autopilots each get a Scan button, under the + in the folder that owns them. Isolate the device you mean by starting the engine, waking the pilot or connecting the box, then press scan. Zora reports what it created and what it refreshed. Nothing appears behind your back any more, and a twin-engine boat no longer collects a second row beside the engine you already listed. Alternators and gateways now have inventories of their own.

On a discovered asset the Info tab shows everything the device reported, and every field is yours to correct or add to. Duplicate is gone, since a copy could never be matched back to the physical unit. Delete is gone too: use Decommission, which retires the equipment and keeps its maintenance tasks, service log and hours.

If a device goes quiet, the notification names it and tells you when it was last heard.

Your Garmin Reactor Steers to Wind

September 2026

A Garmin Reactor holds a wind angle set from Zora, the way a SeaTalk1 SmartPilot already does. The helm also shows the course the pilot has settled on instead of the mode alone: the Reactor has been reporting that course all along and Zora was not reading it.

The coarse course step on a Reactor is 10 degrees, which is what the control head's Step Turn Size is shipped at. Zora was sending 15, and a press that asked for 10 was quietly rounded up to it.

Autopilot

August 2026

A discovered pilot lands in the equipment register with its running hours, so it keeps a service record like anything else aboard. Off-course alarms are armed for whichever pilot is steering rather than for one make.

SeaTalk1 SmartPilots can be fed wind and will report back the angle they are holding, so a Raymarine pilot of that generation steers to wind from Zora and tells you what it settled on.

Digital Switching on Modbus Relays

August 2026

A switch can be bound to a Modbus relay board by board and channel, so a boat wired with relay boards is set up from Zora rather than from the board's own tooling. The channel picker leads with the switch's name instead of the channel number, which is the thing you actually know. Relay forms carry a button mode and a connection type, and the widget has a Toggle Flat row style alongside the existing ones.

Units for Every Crew Member

August 2026

Position format is per person now, and every readout honours it, so one of you can read degrees and decimal minutes while another reads decimal degrees on the same boat. The day, month and year order is yours to choose as well, and the timezone picker shows the offset before you commit to it.

Also in September

• A Garmin Reactor trims the right way in wind hold. A press to starboard steered the boat to port. Zora was reversing the command, on the reasoning that turning closes the wind angle — true on one tack, and not how the pilot reads it.
• The coarse heading step works on a Garmin Reactor. The big-step press was sending an adjustment that pilot does not accept, so the boat held its course while Zora reported the turn as done. Each make of pilot now declares the steps it honours, and a pilot that cannot take a command says so.
• Opening a units form and pressing Save no longer moves the number. Draft, keel and the other vessel measurements were converted back and forth and rounded on every save, so the boat's draft crept a couple of millimetres each time you looked at it.
• Cancel puts back what you loaded in the depth and AIS alarm settings, where it had never undone anything.
• A log written from a card appears on that card, and can be given a title.
• Filter the waypoint list and clear the filter and the chart has all your waypoints again.
• Data-link settings open on older links, saved before some of their options existed.
• A label you opened with a finger closes itself. Tapping a button to read its tooltip left the label stranded over the chart until you tapped somewhere else.
• Alarms read in your own units. An alarm that falls back to the bare reading which tripped it, a depth zone for instance, now gives you that reading in the units you have chosen rather than the metres or radians the sensor sent.
• An asset whose device has yet to speak can still be saved. A battery, tank, charger, converter, inverter or solar panel with its data link set but nothing arriving on it showed its fields, took your typing, and offered no Save button.

Also in August

• The on-screen keyboard is on by default, and the trips screen has one.
• Search inside a PDF, with the matches highlighted.
• Done cards leave the board on their own once their archive time passes.
• Batteries and tanks keep their configuration, so it survives a restart.
• A boot splash while Zora starts, instead of a blank screen.

July 2026

• Radar guard zones — mark the areas around your boat you want watched and get alerted when a target enters one. Zones are drawn on both the chart's radar overlay and the radar scope, in the colour of the alert they raise.
• Weather cards show temperature, wind and rain in your chosen units, and you can review your instrument history over the past 12 and 24 hours.
• Radar & AIS refinements — trails update instantly, tapping near a target picks it out more reliably in crowded water, the duplicate info card is gone, and the flashing light indicator always appears in the light info card.

For the full release-by-release history, see the Change Log.