On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 12:11:56 PM UTC-7, wrote:
Ok, so how about listing a few bullet points of the things that you can do on your iOS device (running what SW package?) that can't be done on Android running XCsoar? This isn't an attempt to be argumentative - I'd really just like to understand why one is or isn't better than (or equivalent to) the other.

Robert

On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 1:11:12 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:
On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 8:20:09 AM UTC-7, Dan Marotta wrote:
As a retired engineer I recall the old wisdom that "better is the
enemy of good enough".



My ancient Dell Streak 5 ($100) running XCSoar (free!) gives me the
same information that your systems do though it does not bring me a
cappuccino and massage my shoulders while I fly...* Sure the new
products are great, calling what works comical is simply snobbish..




On 5/4/2015 8:36 PM, Sean Fidler wrote:



Same here. iPhone 6 and the Galaxy Note 4 are far, far (the two smartphones that I use), better than the now ancient Oudie in literally every conceivable form of measure other than raw brightness. Thee difference in total brightness is very small now with the latest smartphones. SeeYou is so outdated that its almost comical. It truly pains me to use an Oudie when the far better devices are in the pocket of my glider (still illegal to use them in the USA although that might be evolving soon...).





--

Dan Marotta

"My ancient Dell Streak 5 ($100) running XCSoar (free!) gives me the same information that your systems do" Well, - in a word - No. There is no doubt that it costs a lot to approach perfect, but I could as easily say that I can get the same information from a pellet variometer and a sectional chart as you get on your Dell Streak. Yet the discerning person notices a difference.

Without being argumentative, give me a list of bullet points that you can do on XCSoar that can't be done with a printed chart and a slide rule.

None of these give you anything you could not have gotten before, they just do so with less pilot workload. The elegance of a superior UI is not easily distilled to bullet points. I have used both XCSoar and iGlide (iOS) for the last two years in about equal amounts. Anything you routinely do on XCSoar is more quickly accomplished (usually much more quickly) with less user attention on iGlide. In this regard SYM is a distant third. Actually standing second is Winpilot with a better UI than XCSoar or SYM even 15 years old - but it is no longer maintained so not in the running. If you put two pilots side by side and have them do some routine task on the PDA, while counting gliders flying by the canopy, you will see a big difference. An example might be adding a turnpoint between TP3 and TP4 in a task. How many click does that take you on XCSoar?

I do not want to dis XCSoar in particular, the price point is great, it does an OK job compared to others, and is feature rich if you can find them. It is not a pinnacle of UI advancement however, either due to the experience of the authors or (perhaps) the constraints of having to make it work on highly disparate hardware. I do dis SYM a bit, really no excuse for them - but of course SY itself is pretty much the same train wreck of UI, so it's inbred.

I will give you one bullet point for the iGlide/Air Vario combination that you cannot do on anything else though: instantaneous wind presented each second around your thermal circle. Which is surprisingly (maybe even alarmingly) useful.