Supersonic wrote:
I am just about to decide whether to renew my SkyDemon subscription or to jump on the ForeFlight wagon.
Are you primarily VFR or IFR? It has a lot of shortcomings for VFR compared with the established European VFR tools.
Indeed, if you are VFR then FF lags far behind SkyDemon and Easy VFR for european use. I did not renew my FF subscription.
I’m giving FF another 60-day trial – with thanks for their policy which lets us do that soon after the last trial. In those few months the app has improved enormously. We now have airspace labels, frequencies and listening squawks on the map, some parachute jumping areas and some small airfields. We’re missing a few more (Falgunzeon and Bedlands Gate, for instance). Some airfields like Kirkbride are on the map twice (as EG37 and EGZF) which seems a bit OTT.
The transfer of flight plans by Connext from FF to Garmin GTN650 is still a dead loss, with many airfields and VRP waypoints unrecognised and “locked” in the GTN flight plan.
No doubt this will be fixed in due course, in anticipation of which it would be nice to be able to designate any FF user waypoint as an “airfield” so that it will upload as such to the GTN navigator.
Meanwhile, would someone else with FF mind checking a curious “feature” for me:
If we create a flight plan, say, EGH9 EGBE (from Glenswinton to Coventry) and export it to the Flights page the distance is 185 nm. So far, so good.
Now if we insert the M6 Junction 3 VRP (EGH9 VP227 EGBE) the distance in the FPL window is still 185 nm, but if we export it to the Flights page the trip distance becomes 6 nm. This would save me a whole lot of time and fuel next Sunday, but is probably too good to be true. 
Jacko wrote:
Now if we insert the M6 Junction 3 VRP (EGH9 VP227 EGBE) the distance in the FPL window is still 185 nm, but if we export it to the Flights page the trip distance becomes 6 nm. This would save me a whole lot of time and fuel next Sunday, but is probably too good to be true.
I see the same in the latest beta.
Thanks Jason.
In the above example the disparity was large enough for me to notice, but if we move the intermediate waypoint nearer our point of departure (say EGH9 DCS EGBE) the Flights page shows 156 nm when it should show 187 nm. Substituting EGK1 for EGH9 produces a similar error, so it seems to be a “feature” of the software, not the database.
If unnoticed, this might lead to insufficient fuel reserve at destination.
P.S. Josh, I don’t mean to be over-critical. It’s early days for FF in Europe. You’re kind enough to let me use the app FOC for two months, so if I’m not quite ready to pay for it, the least I can do is to tell you why. In my case, the Connext flight plan transfer bug is the main deal-breaker – it would drive me bananas to have to poke at the GTN screen every time I upload a new flight plan from my iPad.
Does anyone know what determines the apps that iOS presents when one does a share (box with the arrow leaving) in FF? Or generally, for that matter. I’ve always been mystified how iOS decides which apps to present when doing a share.
I have EasyVFR, FF, and ADLConnect on an ipad and I am able to transfer a route from EasyVFR to ADLConnect using the share function, or to FF or any other of a long list of (not necessarily applicable) apps. On FF there are essentially no apps presented to receive a share. And that is on the same ipad.
The target app registers as a handler for each kind of document it can handle.
When the source app triggers a share, iOS looks at what is being shared and offers the list of suitable targets.
If nothing appears on the FF share menu, it means that the file it is trying to share is not supported by any other app.
stevelup wrote:
Are you primarily VFR or IFR? It has a lot of shortcomings for VFR compared with the established European VFR tools.
Primarily VFR.
I agree with you. At the moment I will probably stay with SD.
However, FF has taken quite some development since last year. At the current stage the cumbersome flight planning without separate leg altitudes and the rudimentary basemap are deal breakers.
But – considering the recent merger with Jeppesen MFD – this might possibly change soon. I always found the Jeppesen base map to be the best one around…
stevelup wrote:
If nothing appears on the FF share menu, it means that the file it is trying to share is not supported by any other app.
That can’t be right…
EasyVFR exports without any problem an xml file with .fpl extension to ADLConnect (i.e. iOS recognizes and presents ADLConnect as a suitable receiving app for selection).
FF cannot export an xml file with .fpl extension to ADLConnect (i.e. iOS doesn’t recognize or present ADLConnect as a suitable receiving app).
All three apps on the same ipad.
I assure you that’s how it works. ADL Connect will have registered a thing called a custom UTI advertising that it can deal with files with an fpl extension.
Any app should then be able to share an fpl file with ADL Connect. To test this, just rename any junk file on your computer with the extension ‘.fpl’ and e-mail it to yourself. You should then be able to open it in ADL Connect.
If it doesn’t work from FF, then they’ve done something weird because this functionality is baked in to the OS. It’s very hard to make it not work – in fact you’d have to actively try to break it. The most obvious explanation is that they are in fact not sharing an ‘fpl’ file in the first place. What happens if you e-mail the shared file to yourself?
