A new version of VATRadar (v1.1) has just been released on TestFlight. VATRadar 1.1 is a major rewrite of both the iOS app as well as the backend server, resulting in much improved performance and a much cleaner code base. Unfortunately, doing this has taken quite some significant time, and I do apologize for the radio silence around this project over the last couple months. Having to split time between work, life and side projects isn’t easy sometimes. On the upside though, now that this rewrite has been completed it will be much much easier to start focusing on new features and enhancements going forward.

While this new version mostly contains technical fixes and under the hood changes, there are a couple of noteworthy UI updates as well. These are as follows:

  • Some list views within the app which may contain a lot of data, such as the list of pilots currently connected on VATSIM, are now limited to show at most 100 entries at a time. When scrolling all the way past the first 100 entries, a “Load more” button will appear at the bottom of these lists, which will then load the next 100 entries from the server when pressed. This change greatly improves app performance in situations where a lot of data is present (such as during popular VATSIM events), and also helps to lighten the load on the server. This does not impact the ability to do searches, however, searching for a callsign, airport, etc will absolutely continue to work as expected.
  • The Centers view, which previously showed a long running list of online enroute controllers, has been replaced with new views, grouping controllers together by their respective FIRs (Flight Information Regions) and UIRs(Upper Information Regions). This makes it significantly easier to get a quick overview of which geographic regions are currently being controlled on VATSIM, selecting a FIR or UIR will then show a list of associated VATSIM controllers.
  • The “Unpatched Airports” section that was present in the airports view has been removed. Significant efforts have been made to improve the way in which VATSIM controllers staffing an airport are matched with the airport that they are controlling, eliminating the need for that section being there.
  • Information displayed within the app should update much more reliably than before. When doing a search, for example, search results will update as expected according to activity on VATSIM.
  • In general, the app should be much more stable and performant. Previous versions of VATRadar sometimes had performance issues when updating data from the network, resulting in the UI locking up for short periods of time. This type of issue should now be a thing of the past.

Happy testing!