Are People Asking Too Much Of IFly GPS

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12/27/2014 9:58 AM
 

OldPilot, I can understand and sympathize with your position but you have to think about this from a marketing point of view, not a technical one.

EFBs live or die by features. There are endless posts on pilot forums and articles in magazines comparing products on features. How else to compare them? UI is subjective, so it gets comments but counting features is a nice objective way to score the products and compare them. So, like it or not, AdventurePilot is in a features race. I remember a comment from a wise manager I once worked for: "When you're dancing with a bear, you can't necessarily stop just because you get tired." AdventurePilot is dancing with the features race bear and can only stop if they want to go out of business.

I don't mind features as I can always choose for myself whether to use them. But there is something more pernicious that also happens: As features are added, the controls for invoking and using them end up getting added to the UI like so many band-aids, tire patches, and post-it notes. The result is an increasingly confusing and arcane UI. While the vendor may recognize this, there are two factors that keep him from doing something about it. First, a rip-up and re-do of the UI is expensive and it will introduce a new swarm of bugs while doing nothing for him in the above-mentioned features race. Second, he is afraid to anger the installed base who are by and large comfortable with the UI. Consider the outcry when M$ Office ditched the well-worn and well-understood menu structure and introduced that stupid "ribbon." So ... I think the real negative of the features race is the monotonic deterioration of the UI. I'm not criticizing AdventurePilot here at all; from close to ten years working with and beta testing EFBs I can say that it is a universal disease. Unfortunately it is us as users that are the victims.

 
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12/27/2014 11:46 AM
 
OldPilot wrote:

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like some people are asking too much of IFly GPS. I guess almost anything is possible given all the information that is available from multiple sources and given the programming time and talent available at Adventure Pilot. However it sometimes seems some people want their tablet to do everything so they just get in the plane and fly from point A to B with zero thought. ........Maybe I'm just "old school," but enough is enough IMHO.



The thing about extra features, that perhaps you're missing, is that most or all can be set as user options.
If you're more comfortable with the more bare bones features, fine.
(Though I do note that what are considered and valued bare bones essential features in an under $1000 aviation Gos today were considered unimaginably rich options 20 years ago .)

I support in my work users if computer desktop software. Most users of a even a world processor use and need only a small fraction of the hundreds of features.. But if the two features that could make what you're working on easier or make possible something not doable without them, you'd do well IMHO to let the developer know you,d like them.

I see nothing wrong with having features in iFly that make it easier to safely fly from A to B with less complex and less demanding thought . Used wisely such features frees up more brain power, attention, and concertration, for things no GPS can do... Such as listening to the engine an prop sounds, vibrations, analyzing what effect that weather report should have on our plans, looking carefully at that windsock, talking the the pilot who touched down 15 minutes ahead iof my ETA about what runway conditions were, etc.

And, finally,when, for example , some of us request a best/maximum glide circle display moving with us on the iFly sectional screen, it' snot because we want to fly without thinking.. On the contrary , . It can be because we ARE constantly thinking about modifying our heading to stay within glide of as many viable engine-out set down spots as practical... Not flying mindlessly from A to B. ;-)


 
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12/27/2014 3:49 PM
 

If we didn't ask/expect more from iFly then many would move to software that offers more. The competition isn't standing still, neither can iFly. Excess for one user can be inadequate for another.

 
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