ForeFlight Breaks With Tradition, Releases Update Info Early

In a Zoom info session last week, ForeFlight gave Plane & Pilot a special preview of its next as yet-un-numbered release of its popular ForeFlight all-in-one flight app. The app, which combines moving map, flight management, weather, charts, aeronautical information, synthetic vision and more, is available for the iPad and iPhone devices. The new version will be available starting on May 26.

Chief among the changes was the initiative to make the user experience between devices, such as iPad and iPhone, more similar. In that, it seems to have succeeded in impressive fashion, but there are more great changes.

The biggest updates, ForeFlight has said, were to the interface, which is largely what inspired the early release, and many of those changes were necessitated by the ability of the iPad to allow users to work on more than one app at a time, called multitasking. They described a common scenario in which a user might use the timer feature while monitoring charts. Oh, the timer is new, too. We won't go into detail on multitasking, but do check out ForeFlight's video on it.

Another quality-of-life improvement is a new slide-out menus scheme. After you're done using the menu, it can be stowed so you can see the chosen function.

This allowed them to optimize a number of utilities in ForeFlight. An example they gave was Checklists, which now allows you to see the chapters on the list and not just the items.

Other changes include a new settings interface, which they demonstrated and which seems to simplify and clarify user settings, an editable tab order, so you can customize which tabs you want and where you want them for easier selection.

And the new version also optimized syncing between devices, such as two iPads or an iPad and an iPhone, a popular combination of devices.

Other improvements, ForeFlight said, are to chart accessibility---it's much easer and faster to find the approach or other procedures chart you're looking for---and weather display options are updated, as well.

This video from ForeFlight goes into more detail on all of these changes.