Basic UI — the chrome around every screen

A few controls float above every tab. Learn them once and they work

everywhere.

The tab bar

Eight tabs let you switch surfaces; three more chart modes sit in the chart

pill's menu (below):

iPad and iPhone landscape — the tab bar is a thin vertical column on

the leading edge.

iPhone portrait — the same tabs sit in a floating top bar.

Turning the device only moves the tab bar: the chart, Live's 3D view and

whatever you were looking at stay where they are, without reloading.

Each tab is identified by an icon — anchor for SafeAnchor, antenna

(📡) for Remote, pixel octopus for Jules,

gear for Settings, and so on. Tap any tab to switch.

A sidebar toggle (the sidebar.left icon) at the top opens or hides a

menu listing all tabs with their full names — useful before you have

memorized the icons. A search affordance opens the

[Command Palette](#command-palette). On iPhone portrait the search button

sits inline in the top tab bar, immediately before the chart pill (AnchorQueen) —

so reaching for search and the chart is one gesture. In landscape it's a

magnifier at the top of the side strip.

A small badge on the Store tab shows how many of your installed

regions have updates waiting.

The chart pill stands for four map surfaces at once. Tap it for a menu

— AnchorQueen (the nautical chart), Sea Sports (live, plan, discover, voyages & regatta for water sports — see Sea Sports), Merconi (marine life and dive

overlays), Capt's Notebook (logbook and marks) and, while charter is on,

Charters, which opens the Notebook straight on its

Charters desk. The pill wears the surface

you are on: the surfer in Sea Sports, the dolphins in Merconi, the book in the

Notebook, a sailboat on the Charters desk.

A badge on the chart pill counts what is waiting in your Notebook —

log entries the instruments wrote since you last opened the Logbook, and

charter updates (a price drop on a boat you follow, a saved trip now inside

its last week). The menu says which, and carries the figure with it: the row

that is holding updates swaps its icon for a numbered bubble — ② beside

Charters — above the line that spells it out (2 charter updates).

Tapping the entry takes you to the page that needs you, and the badge clears

when you get there.

See Badges and the picker.

Inside Store, For you helps you choose coverage, with Charts, Plans

and Jules directly accessible. A chart-region link from the map opens

Charts directly, preserving the region you selected.

Where the app opens

The very first time you open AnchorQueen you land on the AnchorQueen

chart tab. After that the app remembers where you were: close it on Meteo,

Jules, or the Store and it opens there next time — including the sub-mode

you left the chart on (Route / Discover / Voyage) and the screen you left

SafeAnchor on (Anchor Watch / History / Radar).

Two things override the remembered tab:

An armed anchor watch. If the watch was still armed when you closed

the app, it always reopens on SafeAnchor — that surface outranks

everything else.

Start with SafeAnchor. With that setting on ([Settings → Safe Anchor →

Launch](settings.html#anchor-watch)), every launch goes to

the SafeAnchor Radar screen instead.

The welcome tour

The first time you open AnchorQueen — and the first time you open it after

an update that brings a new tour — a few short pages walk through what the app

does: charts, Live 3D, the route planner, SafeAnchor, Meteo

and Jules. Swipe or tap Continue to move on; Skip (top right) closes

it at any point. It is shown once.

The chart page shows the map two ways. Satellite 2D is real imagery

under depth contours and seamarks; Nautical is the chart itself — depths,

hazards, buoys and lights, by day and by night. The page switches between

them on its own; tap a pill to stay on one. Its line underneath says what

that view is for.

Live 3D follows with the same idea in relief — Nautical 3D and

Satellite 3D (see Live — the 3D chart). It

appears only where Live is enabled on the chart bar.

With Reduce Motion on, the pages don't switch views on their own; the

pills still do.

On a new install the tour comes first, then the location explainer —

you see what AnchorQueen does before it asks for anything.

After an update, the last page offers What's new in this version,

which opens the full release notes. The notes don't also open on their own

that launch.

An armed anchor watch is never covered by the tour.

After an update: what's new

The first launch after AnchorQueen updates opens that version's release

notes on top of whatever tab you were on. It happens once per update — close

it and it stays closed until the next one. When the update brings a new

[welcome tour](#feature-tour), the tour takes this slot and links to the notes

from its last page.

A brand-new install never sees it; there is nothing you could have

missed yet.

An armed anchor watch is never covered by it. Update while riding to

your anchor and the notes wait for a launch when the watch is off.

You can reopen them any time from the sidebar's User Manual entry or

Settings → Help, where the notes for earlier versions

live too.

Menu in the side panel (iPad landscape)

On iPad in landscape the map opens a resizable side panel on the

right edge. There the menu lives inside that panel as its home screen —

the separate left drawer and its toggle are not shown, because the panel

already gives the menu a permanent place with far more room. Tapping a

feature on the chart (a harbour, a vessel, a legend) slides its detail in over

the menu; Back returns you to the menu. Collapse the panel with the

chevron to reclaim the full map; the thin rail that remains re-opens it.

On iPhone the menu works the same way in every orientation: the left

drawer opened by the sidebar.left toggle described above. In landscape the

toggle sits at the top of the left tab rail, so rotating the phone never

moves the menu to the other side of the screen. The right side panel still

appears on iPhone in landscape — but only to host feature details, the route

planner, and the simulator console (below), never the menu.

On iPad held in portrait there is no side panel either, so the menu stays

in the left drawer there too.

Route planning & Simulator dock here too

In landscape, panels that would otherwise cover the bottom of the chart

move into this same right side panel, so the map stays clear:

Route mode — the route planner (saved-routes list, A/B endpoint slots,

the depth / wind / wave / speed graphs, and the route actions) fills the

side panel instead of a bottom sheet. The menu is hidden while you plan and

returns when you leave Route mode or minimise the panel.

Simulator — the helm / autopilot console docks in the side panel while

the simulator is running.

In portrait both still appear as draggable bottom sheets over the chart.

The sidebar header

The top of the sidebar carries a few quick links above the tab list:

Captain card — your avatar, name, and email. Tap to open your

captain profile. While you are signed out the card reads

Sign In, and tapping it opens the

sign-in screen — the same one the Captain tab

shows — so you can create an account without leaving the chart.

Subscription — shows your plan, or an Upgrade to PRO button that

jumps to the Store subscriptions.

Active Vessel — the boat the app is tracking; tap to switch vessels.

User Manual — opens this manual inside the app. It is bundled with

AnchorQueen, so it works with no signal at all; it includes the release

notes for this version and for earlier ones. See

the manual and release notes.

Feedback & Support — shows a red badge when the crew has replied

to you (and the subtitle reflects open conversations), tapping straight

into the thread. Opens the in-app feedback flow where you can

report a bug or request a feature, attach a screenshot, and track the

status of everything you've submitted (Open / In progress / Resolved /

Closed) — with the team's replies and your own follow-ups in one thread.

The same screen is reachable from the SafeAnchor → Radar menu — see

Feedback & Support.

Notifications — an inbox of every push AnchorQueen has sent this

phone (a reply from the crew, a weather alert, a daily report, an offer),

so a banner you missed or dismissed is never lost. The bell turns red with

a count while anything is unread, and the row's subtitle shows the latest

message; a small red dot also sits on the sidebar button itself. See

[The notifications inbox](#notifications-inbox).

The notifications inbox

Tap NOTIFICATIONS in the sidebar header to open the inbox. Messages are

listed newest first, grouped by day, with a dot beside each one you have

not read.

Tap a message to read it in full — it is marked read, and tapping again

folds it back to two lines.

Swipe a message left to delete it. A deleted message stays deleted, even

if its banner is still on the lock screen.

The ••• menu has Mark All as Read and Clear All (which asks first).

Daily voyage reports, charter price drops, finished reels and release

notes show an Open button that closes the inbox and takes you to the

screen they are about.

Tapping a banner whose message has no screen of its own — a reply from

the crew, a weather alert — opens the inbox on that message. A banner that

arrives while the app is open is kept here too.

The inbox keeps your latest 100 messages on this phone only. It lists pushes

from AnchorQueen's servers; the anchor-watch alarm, battery and grounding

warnings are raised by the app itself and are not listed. A banner you swipe

away before AnchorQueen has run cannot be recovered — see

I tapped a notification and nothing happened.

Live Discover — what you've collected

On the map tabs the sidebar opens with a LIVE DISCOVER section. As you

pan the chart, AnchorQueen pulls nautical objects from online services —

lights, buoys, beacons, harbours & marinas, anchorages, dangers, landmarks,

and wrecks — and keeps them as you go.

Each row shows two numbers, e.g. Lights · 400 · +45:

The running total currently loaded for that category.

A cyan +N badge — how many of those you've collected this session

(since the app launched; objects already cached from a previous run are

not counted).

A +N chip next to the pulsing LIVE DISCOVER header sums the session

total across every category — your "collected so far" tally.

Tap a row's +N badge to open the list of just those newly-collected

objects, sorted by distance. Tap any entry to see its full detail or swipe

to save it as a waypoint. (The AIS Vessels row shows a live count only —

vessels come and go, so there is no session tally.)

Settings shortcuts

On the Settings tab the sidebar shows a Sections list instead: tap a

row to open that section on the right Settings tab — see

Sidebar shortcuts.

Reordering the tabs

You can put the tabs in any order you like:

Open the Settings tab and pick General in the bar at the top.

Under Navigation, tap Tab Order.

Hold the handle (three lines) on the right of any tab and drag it to

its new position.

Lift your finger — the tab bar rearranges immediately.

Tap Reset in the top-right corner at any time to restore the original

order. Your arrangement is saved automatically and survives closing the app.

The top header (map tabs)

On the chart surfaces (AnchorQueen, Sea Sports, Capt's Notebook, Merconi) a

slim header rides over the chart with the tab's name, breadcrumb of your

current location, and quick actions for chart style and layers.

The chart command rail

On any map tab every chart command lives on one glass plate anchored to a

vertical edge — the command rail. It owns the trailing edge by

default; the [content rail](#legends) owns the leading one. Nothing floats

loose over the chart any more, which is what gives the chart back its full

height in landscape — and puts the controls exactly where your thumbs already

are when you hold the phone sideways.

At the head of the plate sits the grip (⋮⋮). Below it the cells are

grouped by how badly you need them, with a hairline rule between groups.

Critical — only while something is live outside Voyage. In Voyage,

navigation, recording and Man Overboard are rows in the

command panel instead; the rail adds these cells only when

you have left Voyage with one of them running:

STOP — while a route is being followed. Tapping it asks you to confirm

first so a stray helm tap can't drop guidance — you can always end guidance

no matter where you've navigated to.

MOB — while a Man Overboard incident is active. See

[the MOB button](#mob).

REC — while a passage is being recorded; the cell burns solid red.

These hold fixed slots. Changing sub-mode, starting a route, or rotating

the device never shuffles them out from under your thumb.

Camera — never hidden.

+ / − — zoom in and out, as one tall two-part cell.

Tools (four-square grid) — opens the tools group inline; tap again to

fold it. Collapsed by default:

Recenter (location arrow) — follow the vessel; lit while the camera

is locked on your boat.

2D / 3D — toggle the camera tilt.

Crosshair (scope) — drop the targeting reticle so the HUD reads BRG /

DIST / DEPTH to that point.

Ruler — measure distance across the chart. Saved measurements stay on

the chart and can be tapped to edit, share or delete them — see

Measuring distance.

Contextual — whatever the current job needs.

Add Photo (Capt's Notebook ▸ Marks only) — drop a photo-first

Captain's Mark.

Secondary — the first to pocket.

Charts (map icon) — chart downloads and chart health for where you are

looking. Opens a small panel suggesting the chart region that covers the

current view, the one covering your GPS position when that differs, the

free World Coastline base map until you install it — plus an expired

("renew") or "update available" notice when an installed covering chart

needs attention. The cell lights up in accent colour while something is

waiting for you and calms once you have opened the panel; every entry leads

to the Store. See

Chart downloads for this area.

Jules (pixel octopus) — summon Jules over the chart

without leaving the map. The chat opens as a sheet anchored to the

bottom of the screen; drag the handle to resize it smoothly, drag it

down (or tap ✕) to close. To give the conversation maximum room the

sheet skips the Jules header and suggestion chips — both stay on the

Jules tab.

Own-ship — hide or show the double-circle vessel marker, its course

predictor and heading ruler, for an uncluttered view of the chart under

your boat.

Clean (Hide map controls) — [clean-export mode](#clean-export).

Two controls are not on the rail: Search is the magnifier in the

[tab bar](#tab-bar) (it opens the [Command Palette](#command-palette)), and

Layers is the sliders button in the chart's bottom-trailing corner.

Cells appear only where they apply (Add Photo in Capt's Notebook ▸ Marks;

STOP, MOB and REC only while live outside Voyage), so the rail never shows

controls you can't use.

••• — the pocket. The rail measures itself against the screen it is on.

Anything that doesn't fit is pocketed behind the ••• cell at the foot,

which opens More controls: the leftovers as large labelled tiles, grouped

under Navigation, Live 3D and Charts in the same order as the rail.

In portrait it rises as a sheet exactly as tall as its controls; in landscape

it opens as a panel beside the rail you tapped. Tap a tile to use it — the

menu closes; a highlighted tile is a control that is switched on. If the

screen is too short for every tile, the menu scrolls. Critical and camera cells are never

pocketed and the rail never scrolls: on a short landscape screen it is the

tools that move into the pocket, never zoom or STOP. In landscape the cells

also draw slightly smaller, so more of them stay out on the plate.

Move the rails with the grip.

Drag the grip up or down to align the rail's contents with the top,

centre, or bottom of its edge — for when your hand sits low on the

case.

Drag the grip across the chart to swap sides: both rails trade edges

in one motion, so the commands land under whichever hand is free at the

helm.

Long-press the plate for Rail options — Reset layout (both rails

back to their default sides and alignment) and Swap sides.

Both choices are remembered, and there is no audio-mute control on the chart.

> The collapse chevron and the dock swap are gone. The rail now sizes

> itself, so there is nothing to collapse, and the two rails trade edges

> as a pair instead of trading top/bottom slots on one edge. Any arrangement

> you set in an earlier version is carried over the first time you open the

chart.

The MOB button

Man Overboard is the most important command on the chart — a red row

with a lifebuoy in the command panel on the right edge, in Voyage and

Discover (tap the panel's button to open it; while an incident is active

outside Voyage the command rail adds a MOB cell). One tap:

Drops a marker at your boat's current position.

Switches the chart to a return-guidance overlay.

Begins continuously updating the bearing and distance back to the marker.

Use it the instant a person or object goes over the side. The command greys

out while a Man Overboard incident is already active, so you can't fire a

second one by accident.

The full return flow — the MOB return HUD, the hypothermia banner, and the

Real Drill / Cancelled outcomes — is documented in

SafeAnchor.

The GPS HUD

The dark-glass control at the top-left of the chart is the captain's

watchkeeper rail. It starts on one line, stays out of the chart's way, and

opens only when you ask for more.

Tap anywhere on it to cycle:

The next tap after Expanded returns to Minimized.

In Compact and Expanded, the pin button on the location header drops

a Captain's Mark at the chart centre and remembers the zoom.

Read the rail

SOG is speed over ground in your chosen unit. Its colour moves from

anchored through drifting, cruising, and fast. A sustained slow creep turns

amber before the dedicated drag alarm has enough movement to fire.

COG is course over ground in degrees true.

Zoom is the current chart scale (z).

LIVE SK means the Signal K link is carrying fresh boat data.

REC means a Voyage is actively being recorded. A connected server does

not start a Voyage.

The anchor zone, wherever the chart is

While an anchor watch is armed, the HUD carries it — on every chart tab, not

just SafeAnchor.

On the rail it is a tinted chip reading / m: how far

you are from the drop point over the radius the alarm fires on. Green while

you are safe, amber approaching the limit, red while dragging.

Open the HUD and the chip becomes a full row: the state word

(ANCHORED / WARNING / DRAGGING!), the same two figures, and a bar

showing how much room is left. The hairline tick on that bar is the alarm

boundary, so you can see the margin beyond it rather than a bar that pins

full the moment you reach the radius.

Tap either one to open the alarm-distance slider on the leading edge of the

chart and re-tune the radius on the spot — the same slider the Alarm On ·

chip on SafeAnchor's command panel opens. Tap again to close it.

The chip appears only while a watch is armed, and takes its width from the

place name, so an under-way HUD reads exactly as it did before.

Passage state announces itself, then steps aside

The coloured pill naming your passage state — On Land, Anchored,

Sailing, Motoring, At Sea — is news at the moment it changes and

not much use pinned to a one-line rail for the six hours afterwards.

So on the minimized rail it appears for five seconds whenever the state

changes, then fades and hands its width back to the place name. That is why

a long anchorage name reads in full on watch but shortens briefly after you

weigh anchor. Collapsing the HUD from an open state also re-announces it.

The state is never hidden from you: open the HUD and the pill is always

there, next to the place name, for as long as the card is open.

> LIVE SK and REC are independent. Seeing LIVE SK without REC is

normal: instruments are live, but no Voyage is recording.

Expand for position and target

The expanded HUD adds a GPS coordinate chip for the selected live position,

a Target chip for the map crosshair, and BRG / DIST / DEPTH from the

live position to that target.

Long-press either coordinate chip to copy it — the menu offers the marine

formats (DD / DDM / DMS), a geo: URI, an Apple Maps URL, an AnchorQueen

link, and Share…. If you paste a coordinate, a pill appears above the card

with Fly to and Add WP actions.

Identify the Signal K boat

Connection state alone is not a position. The vessel appears only after the

server publishes a fresh, valid self position.

When it does, the HUD and chart use the same top-down hull symbol as Navigation

and SafeAnchor. The hull carries your vessel name and rotates to heading, or

COG when heading is unavailable. Expand the HUD to see the server coordinate,

HDG, COG, SOG, reported accuracy, and DEVICE↔SK—the distance between the

device GPS and boat-server fixes. It reads in metres below 1 km and nautical

miles beyond it.

Tap the vessel row to fly the chart to the boat. If the Captain profile has

vessels but none is active yet, AnchorQueen selects the first one.

Choose which position drives the app

Open Settings → NMEA, choose Signal K, then switch on Signal K

Position under Signal K Stream and tap Apply & Connect.

Off (default): the device marker and Signal K vessel can coexist. This

makes the separation visible when the phone is ashore or away from the boat.

On: the Signal K fix becomes the live position for the chart, Navigation,

Voyage recording, and SafeAnchor calculations. The K vessel replaces the

device marker instead of drawing a second boat at the same coordinate.

Feed stale for 30 seconds: AnchorQueen falls back to device GPS so an

active anchor watch is not left without a position.

SafeAnchor has its own radar presentation rather than the chart's GPS HUD, but

it follows the same selected position authority and uses the same named,

directional vessel symbol.

If the link says connected but the vessel or coordinates are missing, follow

Connected, but no Signal K position.

The Command Palette

The search affordance (see [the tab bar](#tab-bar)) opens a full-screen

Command Palette with two tabs you switch between at the top:

Map Search (the default) — one search box across places, harbours,

seamarks, and your saved waypoints. It keeps a RECENT history that works

offline, a Clear History action, and a Jules filter chip that shows

only the searches Jules ran for you. A row of quick filters under the tabs —

All, Favourites, Recent, Marinas, Anchorages, Charter

and Routes — narrows the list in one tap (see

Quick filters).

Features — searches every app feature, toggle, and screen by name, so

you can jump straight to a setting without remembering which tab it lives

on.

With the box empty, the Features tab shows the onboarding-hint features as

a built-in tour of what the app can do.

The chart content rail

The leading edge carries the other plate — the content rail. Same glass,

same grip, but it answers what am I looking at? rather than *what am I

doing?*

It carries one cell per active category, each with a live count badge

for the items currently in view:

Lighthouses, Buoys, Beacons

Marinas & Harbours, Anchorages

Dangers, Landmarks, Wrecks

AIS Vessels, Ghost Fleet

Wiki Articles (a.k.a. Explorations), Captain's Marks

Past Anchorages — your own anchorage history (see

SafeAnchor → Past anchorages on the rail);

this cell stays on every chart mode, including the anchor watch, once you

have weighed a first stay

Fish Species, Dive Sites, Fishing Watch, Ocean Data

Category cells belong to the chart's Discover

sub-mode. Any category whose viewport count is zero hides itself, so empty

water doesn't clutter the edge; pan back to populated water and the cell

returns.

Tap a cell to open its panel. The panel opens beside the rail in

landscape and as a bottom sheet in portrait — and only one is open at a

time: tapping another category replaces it. The stack of overlapping

floating cards, and the "which card is on top" problem that came with it, is

gone.

The depth legend lives here now. The depth-colour ramp used to run across

the bottom of the chart. It is a cell on this rail instead (every chart mode

except SafeAnchor) — tap it for three cards: Depth Gradient (the ramp, with

a Palette menu to switch depth palettes on the spot), Water Depths (the

EMODnet bathymetry fill, with its own switch and opacity), and Fishing

Activity (the switch for the Global Fishing Watch heatmap — see

Merconi → Fishing). The bottom band it used to occupy

is chart again.

If more categories are active than the edge can hold, the extras pocket

behind the ••• cell exactly as on the [command rail](#camera) — and the

grip behaves identically: drag up or down to align, drag across the chart to

swap the two rails' sides, long-press for Rail options.

Sub-mode bars (bottom)

Several tabs have a frosted-glass pill bar at the bottom showing the tab's

sub-modes:

AnchorQueen chart: Route — Discover — Voyage.

Sea Sports: Live — Plan — Discover — Voyages — Tutorial (the bar hides while Live runs full-screen).

Merconi: Diving — Discover.

Capt's Notebook: Marks — Logbook — Charters

(the Charters pill only while charter is on).

SafeAnchor: Anchor Watch — History — Radar.

The selected sub-mode is highlighted. Tap a pill to switch instantly. The

Notebook's Logbook and Charters pills carry a small count when

something new is waiting behind them.

While a chart downloads, the [chart-transfer strip](#chart-transfer-strip)

appears just above this bar.

The chart-transfer strip

While a chart region downloads or updates, a slim glass bar appears at the

bottom of the screen — on every tab, so you can watch the transfer without

going back to the Store. On the chart tabs it sits directly above the

[sub-mode bar](#sub-modes); on the other tabs it sits at the bottom of the

screen, above the home indicator, and the content above it makes room so

nothing is covered. Only one strip is ever on screen.

Tap the strip to open Store → Charts → My Maps on that region's card.

Swipe it down, or tap its close button, to put away a message; a download that

is still running cannot be dismissed. The strip is never shown on the

SafeAnchor tab, which keeps its own controls clear. It

steps aside while the keyboard is open, is hidden together with the sub-mode

bar in [clean export](#clean-export) and while the Route sheet is docked to

the bottom of the screen, and with Reduce Motion on it fades instead of

sliding. At large accessibility text sizes it grows upward and stacks its

lines. See Automatic updates on Wi-Fi and 5G.

Clean export

The data tools — crosshair, ruler, own-ship and Clean — are

cells on the [command rail](#camera) now; Layers is the single sliders

button in the chart's bottom-trailing corner.

Some chart shots need to be saved without app chrome on top. Tapping Clean

— the crossed-out eye, next to Charts on the command rail — removes

the tab bar, the sidebar, the content rail, every panel and the rest of the

overlays. What survives is the command rail itself, cut down to four cells:

the grip, a lit eye that brings the chrome back, PDF, and

Image.

PDF hands you an A4-landscape chart of the area you are looking at;

Image hands you the same view as a full-resolution PNG. Both open the

system share sheet, so you can print, mail, or save to Files.

Clean export works on the chart surfaces — the AnchorQueen chart,

Capt's Notebook and Merconi. It is

deliberately unavailable on SafeAnchor: an armed anchor

watch keeps its chrome at all times.

The title block and the data-source attribution are rendered into the

exported PDF or PNG — they are part of the saved file, not an always-on

overlay you see on screen. Tap the eye again to bring the chrome back.

If something goes wrong

A control is missing — look in the ••• pocket at the foot of the rail;

on a short screen the tools move in there first. Rotating the device gives

the rail more room. The [tab bar](#tab-bar) moves to the side in landscape.

The MOB button is hidden — Man Overboard is a row in the command panel

on the right edge of the AnchorQueen chart, in Voyage and

Discover; tap Voyage in the bar at the bottom and open the panel.