iFly on Apple Silicon Laptop and Desktop Computers

[Don Maxwell]

I finally got around to trying iPad and iPhone apps on the Mac Studio desktop computer with an Apple Silicon M2 Max chip that I bought last summer.

I ran several successfully before summoning the courage to try iFly EFB. There was a brief learning period while I had to read some help to find out how to use the keyboard for the various iPad gestures, but once past that--and iFly booted up in its own window and commenced loading charts. Then--ta-DAAAAA!!!--it started working absolutely perfectly normally on the Mac.



The keyboard help is in the black window just below iFly.

This is the DC helo chart showing KDCA, Washington National Airport, and the river into which that regional jet and the Blackhawk crashed a couple of weeks ago.

 

[Don Maxwell]

Here are a few more screenshots to show that iFy is working normally:

 

[Don Maxwell]

You might not have noticed that I'm not actually IN DC. I'm about 100 nm south, and about 13 nm south of KRIC. So when I clicked on NRST the nearest airports are all near where I am:



What that tells us is that somehow--I haven't figured out how for sure yet--iFly knows where the Mac is, and that shows up as a GPS location.

Anyway, if you have a recent Apple desktop or laptop machine with an Apple Silicon chip, why not give iFly a try on it? And every other iPad or iPhone app you'd like to run on the machine. Apple says that not every app works; but I've found a lot that do. Including iFly EFB.

 

[Cobra]

What that tells us is that somehow--I haven't figured out how for sure yet--iFly knows where the Mac is, and that shows up as a GPS location.

If you've ever pulled up Apple Maps or Google Maps in a web browser on your Mac, you would see the map centered on your approximate location. This is a result of the huge amount of data that Apple and Google collect on their users. When your iPhone--which has GPS--is connected to a wifi network, Apple associates the GPS location with that wifi SSID. When other Apple devices join that wifi, then even if they don't have GPS, Apple knows approximately where they are. Google does the same with Android phones and tablets.

Collect a whole bunch of data correlating device GPS locations with which wifi SSIDs they can hear, and you can build a pretty good map, and you can supply devices that have wifi but no GPS with some location information, at least in areas with wifi. Even without wifi, if you've got a machine connected via Ethernet to an ISP, Apple and Google can at least tell what city and sometimes what neighborhood you're in from your IP address.

There's more involved in the process than just that, but that should give you an idea of how it's done. Use your favorite search engine to learn more if you're curious.

 

[Don Maxwell]

Cobra, that makes good sense--but what puzzles me is that iFly is reporting "Weak GPS Signal" (just below the 360 mark on the tape instrument). That seems to suggest that it's actually receiving a GPS signal, rather than interpolating from all that other data.

Also, the GPS Status instrument appears to be reporting a one-bar signal:



So it seems that iFly wants to think it's getting a GPS signal. Maybe. It's not too surprising that this stuff doesn't work perfectly--surprising that it works at all!

(On the other hand, there's no reported data in the ADSB Status instrument, just below the GPS Status. The ADSB Status menu opens, and also the Options submenu in it. But there's no data in either menu, and I wasn't able to get the little uAvionix Ping ADSB-IN router to connect, either.

 

[Cobra]

Cobra, that makes good sense--but what puzzles me is that iFly is reporting "Weak GPS Signal" (just below the 360 mark on the tape instrument). That seems to suggest that it's actually receiving a GPS signal, rather than interpolating from all that other data.

I answered this question in the Beta forum, but will repeat it here publicly in case any other folks have the same question.

The short answer is, "You're reading too much into it".

iFly was originally designed to operate on devices that had GPS built-in, then support was added for external GPS. So for quite a while, the only way iFly could get a location was via GPS. Thus, "location" and "GPS" were essentially synonymous, and so the alert messages all reference "GPS", and that's never been changed. It's as simple as that.

Nowadays, not every device iFly runs on has built-in GPS, but every device does still offer some level of location determination, at least when connected to the Internet. When there is no external GPS receiver in use, iFly queries its host device to provide its location. The device will return a location along with a qualification of the location data's precision.

iFly has no way of knowing whether its host device actually used GPS to determine that location. It just knows "location" and "location precision qualifier".

Devices that don't have built-in GPS will include a low-precision qualifier in the location result they pass back to iFly. iFly alerts the user to this low-precision result with the flashing "Weak GPS Signal" alert.

 

[Don Maxwell]

Thanks, Cobra. Of course precise location isn't a problem when iFly is running on a desktop machine--or on a laptop, either, for that matter, because you'd have to be nuts to try to navigate in flight with a laptop, when any number of tablets and phones are available to do the job better and much more cheaply. What's important here is that the app runs on my main home and work computer and also on my wife's Apple laptop.

To continue this PIREP: The iPad version of iFly EFB still seems to be working fine on the Mac desktop computer. I had some trouble getting it to take my password--but that was mostly because there's about a 1 second lag between each password character entry and its display on the Mac. Evidently the data has to go to Texas and back before it "takes" here. And of course, there's that proprietary iFly keyboard, so I have to enter every character by clicking with the mouse pointer onto the onscreen iFly keyboard instead of just typing on the Mac keyboard or pasting it in. Anyway, those are small matters. The important thing (for Mac users) is, it works!