I hope you and your loved ones are healthy and doing ok. The last few weeks for me have been all about getting used to home-office-situation and trying to divide time between client projects, Aufwind and keeping the kid happy and occupied. I’d love to hear how you are coping with the situation.
When is Aufwind coming out?
Since this pandemic started and it became clear that most gliders are going to be grounded for a while, I’ve been trying to decide what to do with Aufwind. I’ve been working on this app close to a year now but I have not been able to use it seriously for flight-prep myself yet and it seems like there won’t be not much demand for it out there this season.
I have decided it’s still best to stick to the original plan and finish Aufwind and release it before the high season for cross-country flying starts. Even if it will used by far fewer pilots than normal, I hope it would still be useful to the ones who get to fly and I will start getting very valuable real world feedback from them even if I can’t fly myself.
I will be increasing the number of beta testers in the coming weeks and plan to release the first public version on the App Store before June 1st. 🤞
What’s in the next update?
Again, huge thanks for testing Aufwind and reporting bugs and giving me feedback. I have been busy with a very significant update with following:
- A near global NOTAM database with daily updates. Do let me know if I forgot to add your country and I’ll see what I can do.
- A brand new super-fast low-level aviation data engine for airspaces and airfields. This is so much faster than before, such that all searches are instant and you don’t need to select which FIRs should be rendered on the map anymore. Everything within ~1000km of the selected airfield is loaded onto the map. First person to request a larger radius will need to provide proof they really do fly over 1000km one-way 😉. (The initial conversion of existing data could take a few seconds but only happens once during the first launch.)
- Australian and New Zealand airspaces bundled with the app
- Bunch of UI bugfixes and improvement. More coming soon…
- Due to the many low-level changes, I disabled the file import feature for now but it’s coming back with the next update.
Give it a whirl and please send me feedback on what you like and don’t like and what else you’d like to see in Aufwind.
I’d also appreciate if you take a minute to tell your aviator friends about Aufwind. I’m going to add a lot of folks to Aufwind beta.
And most importantly, take care of yourselves and stay healthy!
Best,
Engin.