Hi friends, 

It has been a hectic three weeks with a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get a new approach plates system implemented. Although not yet fully ready and some things still need to be improved, we think the current implementation is already worthwhile to play with. However, please take the following limitations into account :

1. PLEASE LIMIT THE NUMBER OF INSTALLED COUNTRIES TO A MINIMUM REQUIRED BEFORE RUNNING THIS UPDATE. We realise it is  tempting to tick all available countries when installing EV4, but this will cause EV4 now to keep track of thousands of approach plates and documents and download gigabytes of data. 
2. PLEASE WAIT WITH DOWNLOADING ALL PLATES FOR ALL INSTALLED COUNTRIES. This version will be installed by a few hundred betatesters in a short timeframe, and when you all download all plates at the same time this might cause a massive overload of our EFB server. 
3. Downloading of *all* plates for *all* countries installed works ok for the Windows and the iOS version; however on many (but not all) Android systems this freezes the app, but also not always (seems to depend on the number of plates involved or the countries involved). We know the huawei M5 and P10 suffer from this, but the Samsung S4 works perfectly. We will work on this as first priority next week, but thought it would be doable to release this version still dispite this problem. 
4. Not all approachplates can be dynamically rasterized to improve appearance. Improving this is a continous proces.
5. in rare cases dynamically rasterized approachplates can be totally wrong georeferenced. When you find such a case, please email a screenshot with the QuickInfo page visible to helpdesk@pocketfms.com so we can use that to improve the algorithm. 

Compared to EV3 we wanted to accomplish a few things :

• Improve render quality of approachplates. Historically the old PocketFMS desktop and Dynon SkyView systems had a limitation that images should not be larger then 1024px. As a result the entire approachplate georeferencing toolchain is taking this into account. The result is however that some (many?) rasterized approach plates are not of a quality that meets modern standards. EasyVFR4 tries to improve this by dynamically rendering the PDF assocatiated with an approach plate file. 
• In EasyVFR3 maintaining the Approachplates is done via the EFB system. This doesn't work really well, and there is a design flaw that new documents (added later in time to the EFB catalogue) for airfields in countries the user selected for download where not automatically added. EasyVFR4 tries to bring maintenance of approachplates to a minimum.

Generally speaking the approachplate system in EasyVFR4 is very easy to use. Whenever the user updates aerodata for the installed countries, EasyVFR4 will automatically download the internal EFB catalogue as part of the aerodata. Contrary to EasyVFR3 the user no longer has to initiate this himself. 

From then on each query of an airfield via the QuickInfo wheel will download all associated approachplates and PDF documents for that airfield. This happens when the ApproachPlates button is turned on : 

From this QuickInfo screen the user can toggle which plate to overlay by simply tapping the corresponding thumbnail :

The AeroData update procedure (what the user is supposed to do every 28 days) will analyse the downloaded EFB catalogue and check which previously installed approach plates have a new version. Together with new found plates for the selected country EV4 will put these in a download queue, but not actually download them. These plates can then be actually downloaded using the option in the download menu :

By tapping this menu option EV4 will start downloading these plates:

 tapping this menu option once more will pause the download.