Jonathan,

That's true, but who knows how long Seattle Avionics is going to be
around? Based on the published bio of its CEO, it sounds like he
basically specializes in starting companies and then selling them.

The SA product DOES, however, let you grab the plate updates from the
FAA instead of the SA server, which is nice.

Not really. If the FAA changes one character, then the software vendor
(e.g. SA) has to update all their programs or have some way to tell their
program where to find the actual data. It has happened before, and it'll
happen again. Things change a lot more often than you think - a well
designed program hides this from you.

The way we've written the new *free* WingX Browser (Weather Service) for the
Pocket PC is to grab all the data on our server and make it available to the
WingX Browser clients. That way, if anything changes on the 3rd party
server, the worst our pilots will experience is a minor hickup while we
re-direct our code - no updates required by the user, in fact they may never
know anything changed. The key to all this is that you are dependant on
your software vendor. If the company get sold, goes under, etc, your
downloads will stop working sooner or later and you won't get any updates.

Hilton
FYI: By *free* I mean no signup, no registration, no fees, nothing, zippo,
zilch.