Phone Layout

🇮🇱 עברית

The phone layout (strip, deck, sheet)

A narrow screen gets a different set of furniture from a desktop one. The chart is the thing being read, the two actions a pilot reaches for in the air are Record and Location, and a phone has one screen — so the layout is a data strip along the top, a deck of five tabs along the bottom, and one sheet for everything else. Comm fail, the emergency action, sits apart from the tabs: a red button in the strip.

It is on by default on narrow screens and on touch devices. ?deck=0 in the address brings back the floating menu card (which is also what a desktop gets), and the gist can withdraw it for everyone with featureMobileDeck.

The strip

LLBS → LLHZ and then the numbers: 104 kt · 2450 ft · 075°. A second line carries the Zulu time and the look-ahead hour.

• The flight is named first, because a readout with no idea what it belongs to is a dashboard rather than an instrument.
• The numbers are the live readout's own text, not a second calculation, so the strip cannot disagree with the panel.
• When the line does not fit, the strip drops in the readout's own order of importance — the subscale setting, then the point count, then the elapsed clock. Speed, altitude and heading are the instrument and never go; the flight name gives way instead, because a shortened name still names the flight. If speed, altitude and heading alone are still too wide — a five-digit altitude with a large phone font — their text shrinks to fit (not below 70 %) rather than being cut: at 34,000 ft it reads 495 kt · 34878 ft · 133° in full. The elapsed clock gives way on a long flight too (125:30).
• Comm fail is a red button at the strip's edge, always in view and lit while it is on. Beside it is a quick language switch (English ⇄ עברית). While your position is live the language switch steps aside so the readout keeps its line; Settings still has the picker.
• The readout is measured against its own line, so a part that does not fit is dropped, never drawn under the buttons.
• In Hebrew each piece keeps its own direction. +2ש 09:00Z and 07:22Z in one run reorder into nonsense; in their own isolates they read as written.

The deck

Button	What it does
🗺 Map	Puts everything away: the sheet, the menu, any section left open in it, the inspector, the flight plan, the chart viewers, the search panel and the assistant. The chart, and nothing over it
▤ Menu	The whole menu, in the sheet, at the top of it. Pressing it again closes it
📋 Plan	The flight plan. Pressing it again closes it, and opening it puts the menu away
⏺ Record	Starts and stops the track recording
📍 Location	Shows and hides your position

Comm fail is not a tab: it is the red button in the strip. It routes to the nearest field with a published comm-failure procedure and shows the squawk, the tower's phone and the light signals; pressing it again ends it. See Comm failure.

Record, Location and Comm fail light while they are running, not when they were last tapped: the whole cell takes a tinted ground and a bar along its top edge, and the pin pulses while a fix is coming in. Each keeps the colour it has elsewhere in the app — Record red, Location the green of a live fix.

The edit column

Top left, below the strip: Route check (a tick), then Add waypoint, Add note, Undo and Clear map, in the Edit menu's order, then Fit (a "[ ]" frame), as round dark-glass buttons like the in-flight column on the right.

• Fit does what the F key does on a keyboard: it brings the selected A4 / A3 page frame to the screen, or the whole route when no page is selected. It is never dimmed.

• Route check opens the route check for the plan. It reads the route rather than editing it, so the lock leaves it alone; it is dimmed without a route (fewer than two points) and says Draw a route first.

• Each one presses the menu's own control, so the edit lock, the Clear question and the undo history behave exactly as from the menu.

• Add and Add note switch on and off: lit blue while armed, one at a time. While the route is locked they dim rather than disappear.

• Undo and Clear map act once.

• A button that cannot act is dimmed but still answers with why: Nothing to undo, The map is already empty — and while the route is locked (the padlock, or a live position) all four say Route is locked — unlock it to edit.

• The lit Add is the add-mode cue and the way out of it: there is no banner over the chart.

• In add mode, tapping a waypoint already on the route adds it again (closing a loop) without opening the panel.

• On a desktop too, top left in both languages, under the search card; in Hebrew the inspector opens beside the column rather than over it.

Questions and messages

• A question the app asks (Clear map?, Save over it?, a name to type) opens in the middle of the screen, in the app's own theme and language — never the browser's dialog.
• Messages (toasts) stack at the bottom, above the deck, newest lowest. Each has its own line; the same message again refreshes rather than repeats; at most three show. While one shows, the chips that share that band (the start-a-route hint, the coordinate readout) step back.
• Back at the top level asks Close NavAid? — Your route, recordings and settings are kept; a recording in progress is saved first, as if Stop had been pressed.

The sheet

One surface for everything that is not the chart, at one of three heights:

Peek	A glance. The aeroplane and the leg ahead of it stay visible
Half	The working height for a list
Full	For reading

Drag the grip and it follows your finger, then snaps to the nearest height. Tap the grip and it cycles. Drag it below the smallest height and that is a dismissal. Arrow keys and Escape do the same from a keyboard.

Menu opens the menu itself inside the sheet — the same element, moved in and put back on close, so every section, every handler and every remembered choice is the one that already works. While it is hosted it gives up only what made it a floating card: its corner, its width cap, its own scroll, its drag handle and the hamburger. And a menu item that opens something — a chart, the route templates, the NOTAM list — has finished being a menu, so the sheet closes behind it.

Modals open between the strip and the deck rather than centred in a window two bars are covering. They hang from the strip's actual bottom edge, so in the app, where the status bar can push the strip down, a panel's title and close button are never under it — and a panel you drag stays between the strip and the deck as well.

Press and hold the chart

Half a second on a spot that is not an airfield or a waypoint (those open their own panel) and the app answers what is there. On the ground it opens the same inspector a known point gets, titled Point details:

• the position, in the coordinate format the readout uses;
• the nearest published field, with distance and magnetic bearing;
• the highest terrain in that square;
• the satellite view and the VOR radial, as for any point.

And two things to do with it:

• Start route here on an empty map, Add to route once there is one — the same words as a known point's panel. Onto the end of the plan, through the same nav snap the Add tool uses, so a held point and a tapped one make the same waypoint and one undo step; from then on it is an ordinary waypoint with the waypoint panel.
• Direct to — replaces the route with a leg from where the aeroplane actually is to that point. It asks first when a plan is already drawn.

In flight the inspector stays off the chart, so the hold opens a compact sheet instead — position, nearest field, terrain, Direct to and Add to route — keeping Direct to one hold away.

A pan is not a press (10 px cancels it) and neither is a tap. Both actions dim rather than vanish and say why: Direct to needs a position. A deliberate edit lock refuses them; the automatic in-flight one does not — that lock is there to stop a finger nudging a waypoint by accident, and holding the chart then pressing a button is not an accident.

Edges

On a tablet or a phone in a standalone window, the status bar and the home indicator are drawn on the page. Every edge-anchored surface reserves the room it needs — the strip at the top and sides, the deck at the bottom and sides, the map controls in their corners.

Tunables

Key	Live value	What it does
featureMobileDeck	true	The strip, the deck and the sheet on narrow screens
hideMapClockWhileLive	true	Put the look-ahead clock away while a position is driving the map

Related: Toolbar · Inspector · GPS Track Recording · Follow me

The map clock gets out of the way

The time strip lies across the bottom of the chart, and the deck's own strip along the top already carries its readout beside the Zulu clock. So on a phone it goes away when nothing answers to it — no NOTAM, no weather, no wind, no open airfield panel — and comes straight back when something does. A live position hides it either way: the hour being flown is now.

On a desktop it dims instead. There is room for it, it has a fixed place, and a control that vanishes from a fixed place is one a pilot hunts for. hideIdleMapClockOnPhone puts it back on a phone too.