Lido mPilot 4+

In the latest version the annotation options are much more limited. The very useful features that have been removed are:

- ‘undo’ button
- option to drag and resize annotations
- palette with lots of colours (limited to three bland ones now)
- the app remembering selected colours and line widths
- the ability to tap an annotation to bring up the delete option

Overall, the options and functionality are much more limited and the whole annotation part of the app is clunky and not user-friendly. It’s hard work to draw anything in advance (if you make a mistake it’s now four screen taps instead of one) and almost impossible to do it on the fly (e.g. for visualising taxi instructions as we’re being cleared for them). It’s now not a feature I feel I can use.

The AOI pages are now lumped into one page, which means the bookmark and clipboard functions are useless for highlighting the one or two sections which might have been relevant. Instead you have to scroll through the whole lot each time you need to refer to it.

I don’t understand why these changes have been made and why someone thought they would make the platform better. I would like to see the developer revert to the previous functionality as there was nothing wrong with it.

The option to select a runway and then view only its associated charts is, however, an improvement.

Whilst the charting side of this software works fine, the documents section is useless. It’s almost impossible to navigate, and finding local/area restrictions, decoding information etc is extremely user unfriendly. I usually have to rely on ‘guessing’ random keywords in the search function to get me to the relevant section. This is information that should be at our fingertips and often needs to be found in a hurry. Please make changes to improve!

Frustratingly the new annotation feature is a bit of a downgrade to previous version.
You used to be able to write on charts exactly like you would on a piece of paper, useful for agreeing gates on an approach or for writing how you were planning to configure. Also the undo function made it very easy to correct mistakes.

Now the app doesn’t recognise the writing utensil properly, be it finger or Apple Pencil, to the point where it’s not useable. Frustrating considering the Apple Pencil works so well with everything else…

Other features I can live with as just changes, but most of the new features are progress for the sake of progress and not improvements. Overall the updated version has brought less flexibility to what was actually a pretty good app before.