Foreflight feature request

W. Stewart said:
I would like it very much if some VOR's and major airports were shown on the Radar map page. It sure would make figuring out what to file to circumnavigate thunderstorms easier. (The county maps, roads, and bodies of water just don't do it for me.

Wells
Click to expand...

Just hold your finger down where you want to fly and it'll pull up the "nearest" menu with all of the navaids, airports and waypoints to choose from. Or you can hold and drag you course line to where you want to fly and choose from the same options.
 
Without weather being overlaid on the chart, the best you can do is cheat and add some waypoints to your route then switch screens and see which one is past the thunderstorm. It works but is clunky.

Also hit an interesting one yesterday. When the data goes bad and you're looking at the animated radar map, it correctly tells you the network crapper out, but the change of mode on the animation button to the spinning "waiting" indicator also disables the button so you can't turn the animation off. Small bug but you can't get rid of the spinning thing. ;)
 
denverpilot said:
Without weather being overlaid on the chart, the best you can do is cheat and add some waypoints to your route then switch screens and see which one is past the thunderstorm. It works but is clunky.
Click to expand...

Jason's talking about doing something like this:

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Not sure by what you mean "cheat and add some waypoints" - Just tell it where you want to go by touching and dragging your route around the storm as shown above, it'll tell you what's closest to where you touch.

That said, maybe it is time to revisit the weather-on-charts issue. A bug allowed that to appear at one point, and I didn't see it but I heard it just didn't look right. I looked at another piece of software that had radar on sectionals at OSH, and it was... Well, odd. Plus, there needs to be a very fast way to get the weather out of the way and see what's beneath it on the chart. We'll see what they come up with...

Also hit an interesting one yesterday. When the data goes bad and you're looking at the animated radar map, it correctly tells you the network crapper out, but the change of mode on the animation button to the spinning "waiting" indicator also disables the button so you can't turn the animation off. Small bug but you can't get rid of the spinning thing. ;)
Click to expand...

Actually, I've run into this myself, but IIRC the button isn't disabled - It's just that when you hit it, you're telling it you want a static radar image which it then tries to load, which gives you...

... A spinning thing. Doh! I wonder if there's any good way to indicate which one it's trying to load to make that clearer.
 

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If you're not sure of scale, dropping a few known waypoints onto your path (on the sectional or IFR chart screen) because you can see what you're poking at, then switching to the weather view let's you use the "dots" you just put on your track show you if the storm is really over that airport over there, without guessing at where the airport is on the weather map.

You know you want to go around it, and I guess I could get used to just poking and routing around it, but I like to know what the cell is actually over.

I don't find the overlaid weather weird at all. It just needs transparency so you can see through it, and like you said, a way to "declutter" when it's covering something you want to read.

You're right about the button. You just can't tell what it's trying to do. Is it trying to still download frames for the animation or is it trying to download a single image. It gets a but "lost" until it gets some data again (or perhaps it times out).
 
jason said:
Just hold your finger down where you want to fly and it'll pull up the "nearest" menu with all of the navaids, airports and waypoints to choose from. Or you can hold and drag you course line to where you want to fly and choose from the same options.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Jason, but I was aware of that after playing with it some yesterday. That was the day AFTER a trip that I wrote up in "Never Again" on the Red Board! It would be less cumbersome if the Radar map had aviation-related fixes visible, though.

Still, a wonderful product, and I like the responsiveness demonstrated in past upgrades (like the SUA feature).

Wells
 
Is anyone else experiencing a longer than expected delay when asking FF to look up an airport by something other than an identifier, such as a city or airport name?

Running an iPad2 3G 64GB, and all of the databases downloaded. I just tried searching on "Stinson" and it took 20 seconds to finally return KSSF. Another trial was for "allian" to try to bring up KAFW using a partial name. This time it took 30 seconds to find both KAFW and KAIA.

If an improvement could be suggested, I'd ask for a predictive lookup algorithm as I type in characters. Then once I chose a match, bring up the full offering including the weather report.
 
21 and 22 seconds for the above 2 airports, 32G with 11 apps open at the time.
 
Lots of apps open on mine too. Notbsure of the number.

I'll close them all and reattempt.
 
No change with only FF and Safari as the two open apps.
 
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