The time your spending trying to change the UI could be spent on learning the UI.I personally DON'T want to see it changed.Just my 2 cents worth.

The time your spending trying to change the UI could be spent on learning the UI.

The time saved by thousands of new users by not needing to learn it would add up to several lifetimes.Steve Jobs once asked Woz to speed up the boot time of the original Macintosh computer by 2 seconds, using exactly the same reasoning.Nothing is perfect, ever!

I find flight planning boring, I feel no need to dabble with atc (1) a simulation can't come close to what happens rw 2)I can't stand the tedious keypresses needed to do all that). I like that unlike the rw, I can jump in a plane without preplanning the flight, doing preflights, and just go have fun!

I am the opposite in finding pre-flight planning almost as fun as actually flying. While you as a RW pilot may find it tedious I-as a former RW air and ground recce specialist find it endlessly fascinating. Even for sim VFR flights (and I do a ton of that) I like to know potential NAVAID's in case I screw up and find myself approaching IMC....or the sim weather does one of those abrupt changes.Never mind my also adoring navigation, maps, and all the associated stuff.Measure twice-cut once right?But it is all about different flying styles.And instead of Steve Jobs (bless his boots) fussing over 2 seconds he could have at least increased the screen size of my original Mac Classic....ahh the days of flight sim in black and white on a 9" screen. Actually that sucked pretty bad ."I actually had a short e-mail exchange with Austin on saturday regarding the airport selection dialog. Unfortunately he didn't like it because it would add more clutter to the UI"My feelings exactly and as mentioned several times. But hey he took the time to listen and perhaps continuing to offer suggestions for improvement (as options only) may result in something more to others taste.

I am the opposite in finding pre-flight planning almost as fun as actually flying. While you as a RW pilot may find it tedious I-as a former RW air and ground recce specialist find it endlessly fascinating. Even for sim VFR flights (and I do a ton of that) I like to know potential NAVAID's in case I screw up and find myself approaching IMC....or the sim weather does one of those abrupt changes.Never mind my also adoring navigation, maps, and all the associated stuff.Measure twice-cut once right?But it is all about different flying styles.And instead of Steve Jobs (bless his boots) fussing over 2 seconds he could have at least increased the screen size of my original Mac Classic....ahh the days of flight sim in black and white on a 9" screen. Actually that sucked pretty bad ."I actually had a short e-mail exchange with Austin on saturday regarding the airport selection dialog. Unfortunately he didn't like it because it would add more clutter to the UI"My feelings exactly and as mentioned several times. But hey he took the time to listen and perhaps continuing to offer suggestions for improvement (as options only) may result in something more to others taste.

It was kind of the whole point. What one finds fascinating others find tedious. A base level (like a common doorway) would have allowed all simmers from the newbie to the most expert to come into a common "lobby" and then choose "doors" into "rooms" appropriate to their own tastes and abilities.Rooms where they could kind of set up their own furniture and be comfortable.

Edited February 26, 201214 yr by HiFlyer'

It's chelan airport not chelen. I got it after typing the first 3 letters. There was no entry for leadville tho I did get 2 hits for "lake co". I agree a "search by country" option would be nice but personally I have never had any issues with what we have. I think we can update any name changes when posting new airport data to http://data.x-plane.com/regards

How about Chelen airport-rather famous in the airport world. Type in Chelen...nothing....Type in Lake Chelen (the airport name)....nothing....exit the sim and go to airnav to get the identifier.Now-since I have visited most of the US airports I am actually interested in exploring interesting areas of the world. As I mentioned above-Chile has appeal to me. Now what to do....Can't sort by Chile and I found getting info about the airports is difficult.

It's chelan airport not chelen. I got it after typing the first 3 letters. There was no entry for leadville tho I did get 2 hits for "lake co". I agree a "search by country" option would be nice but personally I have never had any issues with what we have. I think we can update any name changes when posting new airport data to http://data.x-plane.com/regards

Sorry about the mispell on Chelan-of course if it was catergorized by countries/states even mispelling would not be a problem...My point on Leadville is there is not one pilot I know that refers to it as "lake co". However, there is only one airport in Leadville, Co. One should be able to type leadville and get it.I remain resolute that this area of the interface needs much improvement. I could give you a whole list of airports that don't work-the reason I know is about 40% of the time I have to exit the sim to find the necessary info. I am glad some have no issues-seems that way for lots of problems and points that have been brought up about improving the sim. I am however glad the issue of unrealistic turbulence that many did not have was addressed in the last patch or two along with incorrect manifold readings. I would like to see this issue that many also don't have improved-for the good of the sim.

hehe bit of sarcasm Geof. Yes I actually agree with most of what you say. The point of turbulence and the problem you discovered about incorrect manifold readings are to do with the functionality of the simulation itself and as such are of much more importance than the UI.Whatever design change they make in the future will never be completely right because for sure there will always be some who want something different.PS I don't think anyone denied there were issues with the turbulence being overdone or maybe I missed that. Still there will always be things that can be improved and/or fixed but it's getting better all the time. I noticed that Flightgear has clouds that move with the winds now. I don't think Xplane has that yet. Something else that can be improved/fixed in the future.

The point of turbulence and the problem you discovered about incorrect manifold readings are to do with the functionality of the simulation itself and as such are of much more importance than the UI.

Fix steak now...improve sizzle (UI) later. LR seem to have priorities in order.

Sometimes I have trouble getting to the steak cause the menus are too small :)

Sometimes I have trouble getting to the steak cause the menus are too small :)

LOL....as a complete derailing side note when I got told I needed reading glasses before Christmas I could not believe the huge improvement it made; however, they are useless with the PC. Other than the reading glasses my vision remains way better than normal.....still 20/15 at age 45 which is pretty good going considering the abuse they have had over the years (stereoscopes, light tables, imagery analysis, abnormal environments) and the rest of my family wear coke bottles to a varying degree.I put it down to my all consuming love of the humble carrot :( . Perhaps I may yet go forward with my cunning plan to obtain at least a Sport Pilot license just for giggles.Anyway...back to the UI discussion.

I am in the same boat but didn't need them till 50. Interestingly-I avoid carrots!

@TedG and @jasonX :I understand your point that LR should fix functions regarding the core sim first. And I completely support that. I don't mean the UI changes are that pressing and I am a patient person, so I can wait one or two years to see that happen, as long as it happens some day...Now back to the discussion regarding particular UI improvements:As I said earlier, I would like to focus now on smaller changes, because no one here will be able to produce a complete concept for a UI overhaul.I am still with Geofa regarding the necessity to make the airport selection easier. So here is proposition for a smaller change:This is the current airport selection dialog:And this is how it could look like by adding country/state filters to the selection list: Lets evaluate the pros and cons for this change, as I see them:Pros:------

• greatly reduces the need to google for an airport outside the sim when you don't know the exact name or identifier
• use of the filters is OPTIONAL. You can still select an airport by simply typing into the Apt. field

Neutrals:-----------

• the filters leave room for improvement. there is no way to filter by city (I intentionally left this aspect out because it would require a different UI change and I want to keep it small and simple here)

Cons:-------

• two more widgets on the dialog, adding slightly more clutter
• you lose about two rows of screen real estate to display runway/ramp positions list
• from a technical perspective: XP would probably use a few more MB of RAM by keeping the additional data structures in memory

I personally find this change very unintrusive for existing X-Plane simmers and I think that the pros overweigh the consSo a question directed at the people who think XP's UI is fine and should not be changed:Can you live with this? Am I and the "other" simmers really asking too much with this change? (OK, those were two questions acutally... )So what would this mean in terms of work to be actually done:

• extend the XP airport database format to accomodate the additional information (I know that developers are very reluctant to change published data formats as other tools may rely on them). Maybe 1 day of work, including documentation.
• code changes to XP to accomodate the two filter combo boxes, their behavior and the data structures behind them. I will make an uneducated guess and say this would cost at most two days work, including testing and documentation
• code changes to X-Plane's airport design tools (WED? I have never touched it) to accomodate the means for capturing the airport meta data (probably the same amount of work as above)
• code changes to ??? tools used internally at LR (don't know if they exist and how much time it would need to change them)
• assemble a list of all countries in the world and their states/provinces and add them to a database (no biggie, probably 2 days of work when working with Wikipedia, maybe less if other open source databases are available)
• Here is the BIG ONE: associate all the airports in the XP database with their respective country and state (more on that below)

So I don't see any of the points, except the last one, from stopping LR to implement this change. Regarding the airport-country/state associations: I see this as an ideal crowd-sourcing project. data.x-plane.com is the perfect site for this. Why not add browser-based community features to that site so people can actually work on those associations whenever they have a few minutes to spare?You could partially pre-populate the database using existing open-source data that is accessible in a machine-readable format. Also, the airports with ICAO codes could at least have their country association derived from the code.I would even go so far to capture the city of each aiport on that site, for future improvements (maybe just as a free-text field to avoid gathering the names of all cities in the world).As I understand, data.x-plane.com is a community project that is maintained by volunteers and the data is also used by FlightGear. So why not approach them with the idea? I know it will probably take one or two years to gather the information, but then this might be the right time when the XP core is stable so one could approach Austin with the actual UI change.

Tom,You forgot to add in an "X" on the window border for closing the airport selection screen. :)The "Cancel" button hidden in the mix of other buttons is another UI inconsistancy which should be remediated during this type of change that had me frustrated on my first uses. Many of the UI improvements can be made without wholesale changes to how you interact with the menus, much like this filter does.-Greg

MUCH better than the mockup I was fiddling with. I would have gone all "Apple" on everything. :(And you managed to keep the overall look and feel of the current system. Your familiarity with the Sim makes you a much better candidate for finding acceptable changes.Though in the end, I think just acknowledging that change can be desirable is a welcome ray of light.Edit: (By the way, can I ask what tool(s) you are using?)

Edited February 27, 201214 yr by HiFlyer'

You forgot to add in an "X" on the window border for closing the airport selection screen. :)The "Cancel" button hidden in the mix of other buttons is another UI inconsistancy which should be remediated during this type of change that had me frustrated on my first uses.

Haha, right :-)There is a certain lack of consitancy in XP's dialogs. Some windows have "OK/Cancel" or "Close" buttons at the bottom of the window (which is pretty standard practice), yet some don't. And some have an 'x' in the top right corner and some don't.While there may be some reasoning behind these design decisions, it makes the UI appear somewhat random to new users.Another example is how runway/ramp positions are presented in the airport selection dialog. I understand that they are displayed as long lists of buttons because this allows you to select a ramp position in a very efficient manner. But on the other hand, this long list makes the dialog appear very cluttered and takes up screen real estate that might be used for more useful features. It is rather common to present long lists of alternative choices as listboxes or combo-/dropdown boxes which take up less space, but require two or three additional mouse clicks.

Many of the UI improvements can be made without wholesale changes to how you interact with the menus, much like this filter does.

Totally agree. And I bet the small changes have the highest chance of being implemented right away. And while it may not cost that much to fix small glitches, the improvements add up and will certainly improve the experience for new users.Sometimes it's just the small details that make a difference:

Your familiarity with the Sim makes you a much better candidate for finding acceptable changes.

Actually, quite the opposite is true:a ) because I am NOT an experienced X-Planer (I have XP9 for like two years, but rarely use it and my XP10 purchase is planned for later this year)b ) It's the users that have NOT yet grown accustomed to the quirks of a software that are actually able to name them. Like a child that constantly asks "Why is that?".

Edit: (By the way, can I ask what tool(s) you are using?)

Just Powerpoint and Photoshop (although any image editor such as Gimp or Paint.net will fit that purpose)