And I prefer redheads, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with
blondes...

On 3/9/2018 9:43 AM, jfitch wrote:
On Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 5:36:08 PM UTC-8, Andrzej Kobus wrote:
On Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 6:35:28 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:
On Thursday, March 8, 2018 at 11:05:31 AM UTC-8, wrote:
With 7 buttons, two knobs, and a 114 page manual I'm not sure Zeus has broken any new man-machine interface barriers. Imagine if Google maps on your cell phone came with a 114 page manual.
Fitchy, Keep in mind those buttons are labeled , unlike some other glide computers. I should have said GUI instead of UI. The LXNavigation stuff at the show had some of the best looking (And yes easiest to interpret) screens of anyone. And thats coming from an LXNav guy. Also, why do you assume instrument manufacturers would use dated technology in regards to touch screens. The stuff displayed at the show was cutting edge in both accuracy and brightness.
If Google Maps could do what my glide computer could I would expect a 114 page manual.FWIW my S100 manual is 105 pages and still leaves a bit uncovered. When you consider the capability and versatility of these things 114 pages is nothing. Even for people like me with short attention spans.
I didn't say they use dated technology but of course they do. Touch screens used are abysmally bad compared to state of the art cell phones. Many are still using resistive overlays vs. the capacitive in-screen touch sensor on cell phones. The Zeus is a 800 x 640 screen vs. 2436 x 1125 on my cell phone, 5 times as many pixels (at 1/4 the price). State of the art cell phones use OLED these days. I'm not really blaming them, the entire lifetime production run of Zeus is about 1 or 2 minutes (literally!!) production for a cell phone manufacturer (about 500K units an hour).

But my point was really UI. There are a couple of modern attempts at flight computers on cell phones: iGlide and WinPilot live. Both have a UI and presentation about 2 decades ahead of LX, LXNav, SYM, etc. Google and Apple have both sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into developing the UI and graphic engines, you cannot expect specialty OS and hardware to keep up in a very small market. The ClearNav have done a better job than most at modernization but is still suffers from the same market realities.

A good gage of UI is "modalism", experts (including the FAA) consider modes generally bad in UI. As a rough gage, the 114 page manual for Zeus mentions "mode" 77 times. The iGlide 16 page manual mentions "mode" twice, both referring to the simulator mode which is not used in setup or flight.
I have been flying with iGlide and LX9000 for long time. I like iGlide for its simplicity but the feature set in iGlide does not come close to what LX9000 offers. In regards to operations the LX9000 is much easier to operate in bumpy air than iGlide and while screen visibility is not bad in iGlide it does not compare to LX9000. I have iGlide in my cockpit as a backup, but I would never rely on its final glide calculation.
I'm curious as to what you find that is essential in the LX9000, that is missing from iGlide. In another thread there were things mentioned like being able to put the glider manual on it etc., but of course any cell phone can render PDFs better than the LX. The final glide calculation in iGlide or any computer is very simple math, and they all do it correctly - any discrepancy is a misunderstanding by software or pilot of the assumptions used. iGlide in particular makes different calculations based on terrain, which I find confusing (and I wish they would change), which is why I leave it off. It results in navboxes for arrival height showing different values than you expect, though correct with their assumptions.

The main thing I find missing from iGlide is the ability to do a MAT task in any reasonable way. To compare screen visibility you need to look at an OLED cell phone - the last generation LED where as you say not bad but not as bright as LX/CN/etc.

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Dan, 5J