New Garmin iPad App

It's available for ANDROID too!!!

Pleasantly surprised, given how foreflight stiffed Android.
 
Could anyone help me understand..

Why all of the excitement of this app from Garmin ? Is there something so special or different about it that I should switch from ForeFlight ?

Also shouldn't we continue to support Forflight.. If it weren't for them designing and implementing their great app at a great price do you think Garmin would have created something that competes with their own gps units ?

Think about this.. It cost many hundreds of dollars to do a single upgrade of a Garmin 496's charts / data. If it weren't for the new programs from ForeFlight and others do you think for a minute Garmin would sell us their ipad solution at a reasonable price or at all?

I like Garmin and own many of their devices 530, 330, 496 .. But I will do everything possible to support the vendors that support us with high quality products at a very reasonable cost and that vendor is ForeFlight.
 
denverpilot said:
The whole industry makes those excuses these days.

Laptop computers better than the first supercomputers -- and still developers aren't held to any coding standards or using automated bounds-checking tools.

I didn't promise a rose garden. :)

I have very little respect for the industry that has kept me employed for a lifetime. They keep coming up with workarounds for lazier people "upstream".

I've been outspoken about the need for coder licensing for over a decade. It'll never happen, and I'll be gainfully employed for the rest of my life.

The industry has done a masterful job convincing users of their products that bugs are "normal" and automated patch distribution via the Net for buggy software is also "normal".

Masterful marketing, really. Buy our product! The day you plug it in there will be 150 patches it will download and update itself with. Don't be alarmed. This is Good! ;)

I loaded a Win 7 virtual machine the other day with whatever the latest "Service Pack" too. It Activated itself and proceeded to change over 12,000 specific things on the hard disk after it downloaded all the patches available.

I updated over 20 Apps this week on both iPhone and iPad too. Starting to wish Apple had a "just download it and install it, the coders will never get it right anyway" option.

And why do I have to type a security password to receive those updates, Apple? Dumb design.

The "Enterprise" class Linux OS at work had over 6000 package updates released in the last month. It's keeping me busy.

I don't see any execs looking around for a better option or complaining to upstream that they need to get control of their mess. They've hidden the problem by hiring me. Yay for me. Bummer for them. Expensive.

Windows even has "Patch Tuesday".

They've Marketed it all the way down into a catch-phrase. :)

Software is buggy. It isn't getting any better. My job as a system admin is to evaluate and automate patches, more and more.

Developers who are seriously on the ball could put me out of a job. They don't. In fact I wouldn't lose a single night's sleep thinking they'll ever slow their craft to a careful, well-thought-out pace, release slower and less often, with zero bugs. It'll never happen.

Instead, I thank them for their bugs and carry on raking in the paychecks. And modern computing continues through its adolescence without much responsibility. Certainly few consequences.

Imagine if an exec actually picked up a phone and called a software vendor and complained that they release too often with too many bugs. They'd get a pat on the head and told to run along.
Click to expand...

Normally, I agree with you. I don't here. It's not the programmers fault, nor is it their employer's fault that software is buggy. It's what the market demands.

<Long and ranty post erased and never submitted went here>

I used to develop C programs. Lightning fast and rock solid when you put it out there for consumption. Today, everything is framework based (which adds multiple other levels for bugs to be introduced) and the demand is to bloat out more and more features as rapidly as possible. Nobody could possibly know the ins and outs of all the frameworks nor have a true understanding of how they are implemented except for possibly a small subset of the framework developers themselves. So we crank out these recent CS grads armed with a knowledge of acronyms like MVC,IOC,DAO,ORM etc.. etc.. etc.. with a high level overview of what they mean but no real knowledge of why, how or if they should use them. Basically the market demands that we sit folks in a cubicle, toss some frameworks at them and have them churning out code for release in a few days. Nobody really has time to sit around and learn "the art" but most if not all developers I know would prefer to.

In other words, sure we could churn out rock solid software, give me a C compiler and I'll make what you want out of it. It'll be a $1 million dollar development effort over the next three years to roll out tic-tac-toe application but you won't be bothered with patches.

I have it the worst, I'm a consultant working in 5 or 6 different languages on unrelated projects, 3 different databases and 50 or so frameworks all of which I absolutely hate and would rather sit down and write the correct tool for the job, but nobody wants to pay me to do that. I usually work solo or in very small groups with customers on a limited budget, I/we force out whatever we can do given their pocketbook constraints and needs. Most of the stuff I crank out, I'd rather spend 20 times the amount of time I do perfecting, but that's not what the market wants.

We've come up with all sort of methodoligies (Agile, SCRUM, Spiral etc..) to try to mitigate the obvious collateral damage, Truthfully, I find that sticking to these methodologies has you doing crap during the time that would be better allocated to having a good developer perfect his code.
 
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iflyatiger said:
Could anyone help me understand..

Why all of the excitement of this app from Garmin ? Is there something so special or different about it that I should switch from ForeFlight ?

Also shouldn't we continue to support Forflight.. If it weren't for them designing and implementing their great app at a great price do you think Garmin would have created something that competes with their own gps units ?

Think about this.. It cost many hundreds of dollars to do a single upgrade of a Garmin 496's charts / data. If it weren't for the new programs from ForeFlight and others do you think for a minute Garmin would sell us their ipad solution at a reasonable price or at all?

I like Garmin and own many of their devices 530, 330, 496 .. But I will do everything possible to support the vendors that support us with high quality products at a very reasonable cost and that vendor is ForeFlight.
Click to expand...

I like Garmin's stuff. When I'm in the air I'd rather have what works best for me over trying to make a statement about the marketing and corporate support.

But, if you want to go that way, FF has unabashedly ignored the Android platform and made us all drink the even bigger glass of corporate Kool-Aid know as Apple to get our fix of aviation software. Garmin just stepped up to the plate, now FF better get on their toes.
 
edcokpareke said:
It's available for ANDROID too!!!

Pleasantly surprised, given how foreflight stiffed Android.
Click to expand...

Don't get too excited, the Android version is missing quite a few features that the iOS version has. weather briefings, rubber band editing of plans, that cool long tap menu, etc.
 
I found two bugs in the iPad version.

The help does not load for me. If I select Help from the menu in the upper right, I just get a big blank page that says help is not available.

The graphical flight plan editor allowed me to unwittingly enter the same waypoint twice, and after that the app gets stuck and won't let me proceed in any way whatever until I delete one waypoint after another until I find the one that was entered twice. In my case I had to delete virtually the entire route before I got out of this jam.
 
Email from Garmin today for anyone interested.

Hello Bart,

Thank you for your feedback and for using Garmin Pilot.

We have been able to duplicate the bug regarding entering numeric information in the Trip Planner area of the application. Update 4.0.2 will have that fix and it will be out in a couple of weeks.

Version 4.0.1 was submitted to Apple last Monday and it should be out today or tomorrow and that will fix a few of the other crashes that we have found.

Please download the updates when they become available.

Terrain data is on the road map for the application but there is no timeframe as to when it will be available.
Click to expand...
 
bartmc said:
Email from Garmin today for anyone interested.
Click to expand...

Glad you heard from them. I received the automated reply on the 30th for my submission about the truncated briefing text and airport-on-the-flight-plan-twice issues I listed above, but no further communication or reply (yet).
 
So, for those that have played with it so far....what does the Garmin App really bring to the table that FF doesn't?

My current x-country setup is a Garmin Aera 510 and my iPad 2 with both Foreflight and Jepp FD. The only complaint I have with FF is the lack of multiple scratch pad pages, but that is fairly minor. The only other thing I wish is that it used Jepp plates instead of NACOs so that I could call up my Jepp charts without switching apps, but that is relatively minor too.
 
Fearless Tower said:
So, for those that have played with it so far....what does the Garmin App really bring to the table that FF doesn't?

My current x-country setup is a Garmin Aera 510 and my iPad 2 with both Foreflight and Jepp FD. The only complaint I have with FF is the lack of multiple scratch pad pages, but that is fairly minor. The only other thing I wish is that it used Jepp plates instead of NACOs so that I could call up my Jepp charts without switching apps, but that is relatively minor too.
Click to expand...

Right now, it's Pepsi vs Coke. I had an aera, it was stolen, I replaced it with an iPad. I like the way the Garmin app is laid out better and it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling since it looks and somewhat operates like my Aera did. I haven't gotten used to FF. I was using WingX but my subscription ran out, so I bought a three month subscription to FF, then this came out and I felt right at home with it. Probably not worth the $ at this point to "swap" if you're already locked in to a ForeFlight subscription. One big plus is that it actually exists for Android devices in some form. I have the Android FF application and it's just basic weather.
 
TangoWhiskey said:
Glad you heard from them. I received the automated reply on the 30th for my submission about the truncated briefing text and airport-on-the-flight-plan-twice issues I listed above, but no further communication or reply (yet).
Click to expand...

Ok, got a reply, and am downloading the update. The personalized responses are promising....

Hi Troy,

Thank you for your interest in Garmin Pilot, and for your feedback.

With regards to your comment #1, we have fixed up the issue that will prohibit you from getting a briefing with the endpoints of your route matching. I’ve tested this on a version here and it does return a full briefing for the route you mention: 52F->KLUD->KXBP->KAFW

As for #2 in your comments below, I believe this has been addressed as well. I will double check with our engineers here to be sure that something has changed that allowed me to get the full brief, where it appears yours is truncated, but what I’ve done is essentially the same thing you were doing. I set the route in question, and went and got a briefing. Attached are the results from both Garmin Pilot, as well as a snapshot from duats.com. They seem to be matching up and nothing is being truncated. It also includes N CNTRL TX in the report.

We are in the process of addressing #3 where NOTAMs are coming back blank.

We should have fixes for all of these items available very soon. We’ve submitted one new release to Apple that addresses some other customer reported issues, and it is in their queue for testing. That will be version 4.0.1. Once that goes live, we’ll be submitting version 4.0.2 as soon as 4.0.1 goes live. 4.0.2 should include the fixes to all of these issues.

Please do let me know if this information doesn’t appear to address the issues you are having.

Thanks,

Brian Conlon
Mobile Application Product Analyst
Click to expand...
 
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Lawreston said:
I haven't "subscribed," yet. How do I download the referenced updates?

HR
Click to expand...

Look for the App Store icon. It should show that the app has been updated since you last downloaded it, and that you should 'update' to get the latest version.
 
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