Introducing ChartFox...

[Alex Toff]

Good Evening Everyone,

 

 

 

I would like to present a new tool for pilots ( I know right?)

 

 

ChartFox is a completely free, digital chart solution for flight simulation purposes. For too long when flying on the network you have had to trawl through mis-matched AIPs, foreign languages and confusing websites to gain access to publicly available charts and airfield information. ChartFox attempts to solve these issues, by giving pilots quick and easy access to charts on-the-fly, across most devices.

 

It currently has around 20,000 charts accessible spanning over 1,200 airports, with more countries being supported over time. On average, 80% of flights on the network have at least one fully supported airport in their flight plan (and more have the AIP supported in lieu)! A full coverage map and live stats can be found on the homepage.

 

ChartFox has, for the past month or so, undergone a series of closed beta tests with members of VATSIM UK, and has also recently been implemented on VATSIM UK’s airfield information pages.

 

 Now, after a successful testing period, ChartFox is being rolled out for the whole of the VATSIM membership to enjoy!

 

For a full feature list, and access: https://chartfox.org

 

 

So, what are you waiting for?

[Agustin Miglino]

Alex,

 

Congratulations to you and the ChartFox team!

 

Is there anyway the South America Division can help you add charts for our region?

 

Regards!

[Charan Kumar]

Looks Brilliant....congratulations and thank you to the team.

[Johnny Coughlan]

Great innovation!

 

This should be included in the pilot clients, I fear there is not enough exposure on the forum.

[Joe Burberry 865512]

Very much a great tool for flying! great work and thanks

[Ernesto Martinez]

Great Tool, will definitely be sharing with the division and VA. Looking forward to seeing some of the Caribbean airports added such as TJSJ, TNCM, MDPC, MDSD...

[Jeff Thomas]

What are you using adsbygoogle for?

[Alex Toff]

What are you using adsbygoogle for?

 

Used to detect adblockers to warn that they cause chart loading issues...

[Furqan Shakil]

Great work.

[William Lewis]

Well done on the site, Chartfox.org!!

 

I have been looking for something to help supplement/replace my usage of a few other charting sites and with the docking feature, Chartfox almost does this for me. So I will leave you some feedback that may [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ist.

 

The one thing that makes me revert back to my old meathod of having each chart loaded onto a separate chrome tab to cycle to when needed is that while using Chartfox, each time I load a chart from the dock I have to resize and rotate. The need to resize and rotate the chart each time it is selected from the dock does not allow me to quickly cycle from one to the other and then back again in an efficient enough manner for my use. If you would happen to have the time and ability to add a feature where once a chart is loaded into the dock, resized and rotated that each time it is reloaded from the dock it brings the chart up in its previous state, I would probably start to use Chartfox as my primary means.

 

Lastly request the ability to open a chart onto a full windowed tab as well. Most of the time having the chart with the remainder of the site surrounding it work sufficiently enough, but I do have a few that I use where I prefer the chart to be full window. The inability to do this on Chartfox is another small item that causes me revert back to other chart websites.

 

Again well done, and thank you for the time and effort you have put into this site to help improve upon our hobby. I am excited to find more ways where I can implement my usage of Chartfox into my flying and controlling routines!

 

 

Edit:Also FYI although the site states that it works with most phones and particularly mentions iOS , it did not work on my iPhone 7 Plus. It states that the site does not support the my small screen size. I do not foresee this as an issue as I would not typically be using my phone for charts, but it was just something I noticed that differed from the site information.

[Ulrich Karp]

Well done.

 

But I also would prefer being able to open charts instead of downloading.

 

Another thing is that appear to sorted the wrong way in many cases. I found i.e. APPR charts in the GEN section.

I [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ume CF is getting the information from the original websites. Being responsible for uploading charts for the EDLL FIR of Vatsim Germany it could be helpful to learn about the criteria you need for sorting charts correctly within CF.

[Paul Woods]

how to log on --- I have tgried using my vatsin cid and password but did not work -- I am trying to use in flightsimtoolkit

[Stefan Loos]

Hi

I really enjoy chartfox. Its great.

However I would ask about some improvements:

You can not move the chart in the view with the mouse (say hold mouse button and drag it which would make things much easier). In zoom mode it is difficult to get to the right position especially when you have rotated images in horizontal orientation. Sometimes you can scroll down by wheel but this is sometimes the full view or sometimes only the chart view. For horizontal scroll you need the bottom scrollbar.

Now: You can not access the bottom scroll bar of the chart view until you have scrolled down the browser win by  the outer right scrollbar. This is my biggest problem. The vertical browser scroll bar to the right is very thin, and you cant really see what the handle is and what is background. Sometimes the vert chart view scrollbar is also open and near to it and makes hitting it even more difficult. I know there are some fit buttons and it is probably adaobe plugin anyway, but maybe one can place the bottom chart view scrollbar on top of the view rather on the bottom? Then it would be 99% in the monitor view even in zoom mode, making it accessible to my mouse all time.

Or would it be possible to autoadjust the chart view allways to the size of the monitor view? So the bar would be allways visible at the bottom of my monitor?

And: I also would appreciate if a docked view remembers a selected rotation or view generally (or if you rotate in the chart view, it is applied also to the docked document and thus applied next time you call it). Many SID/STAR are rotated, and whenever you select an ILS chart and go back you have to rotate again (and also get the view right again)

Thank you 

Stefan

[Tobias Dammers]

On 8/29/2021 at 12:36 PM, Stefan Loos said:

You can not move the chart in the view with the mouse (say hold mouse button and drag it which would make things much easier). In zoom mode it is difficult to get to the right position especially when you have rotated images in horizontal orientation. Sometimes you can scroll down by wheel but this is sometimes the full view or sometimes only the chart view. For horizontal scroll you need the bottom scrollbar.

This is something you need to complain about to your browser vendor, not chartfox. Chartfox just uses a plain old iframe to show a PDF. You can also click the "sourced from ..." link at the bottom and open the original PDF in a PDF viewer of your choice. (Also: most computers these days have 2-way scroll, the mouse wheel can be pushed to the sides for horizontal scrolling, so maybe that works?) Of course you'd lose the "dock" feature then, but maybe that's tolerable when you can flip through multiple PDF viewers instead.

On 8/29/2021 at 12:36 PM, Stefan Loos said:

And: I also would appreciate if a docked view remembers a selected rotation or view generally (or if you rotate in the chart view, it is applied also to the docked document and thus applied next time you call it). Many SID/STAR are rotated, and whenever you select an ILS chart and go back you have to rotate again (and also get the view right again)

AFAIK this is a limitation of the built-in PDF viewer as well. The containing HTML page doesn't know anything about the PDF viewer's state, and every time you reopen the PDF, you get a clean slate - default zoom, default rotation, page 1.

(Disclaimer: I am not involved in chartfox development, I'm just a developer with some general web insight, so I can't comment on what chartfox specifically can and cannot implement)

[Stein Carlsen]

Great site. Just what I looked for! Thanks.

 

[Jonas Eberle]

I just wanted to say thank you! It is great to have this resource available!

I would love it even more if it was Open Source to prevent it from vanishing from the community one day but I respect your choices.

We have put Chartfox links into QuteScoop in order to promote it:

[Alex Toff]

Thanks Jonas and others for your kind words, and I'm glad you find it useful!

With respect to open source: we're not quite ready to release this open source at the moment. There are various issues at the moment, but it is something in our mind for sure.

As was hinted in our blogpost in late 2021 (ChartFox: Past, Present and Future | by Cobalt Grid | Medium), a major upgrade is planned in the near future which should hopefully improve on a lot of issues and annoyances that are present in the current version - we're busy working on this when we get the time, but keep your eyes out for it :)

[Andrea Mazzoni]

On 4/20/2022 at 8:35 PM, Alex Toff said:

Thanks Jonas and others for your kind words, and I'm glad you find it useful!

With respect to open source: we're not quite ready to release this open source at the moment. There are various issues at the moment, but it is something in our mind for sure.

As was hinted in our blogpost in late 2021 (ChartFox: Past, Present and Future | by Cobalt Grid | Medium), a major upgrade is planned in the near future which should hopefully improve on a lot of issues and annoyances that are present in the current version - we're busy working on this when we get the time, but keep your eyes out for it :)

Hello Alex.

I have some question about Chartfox if you're involved in this project. 1-why only support via Twitter? is not efficient and there are users which have a genuine hate for social network cause they think that platforms like twitter, tik tok, facebook provide you just only trash content or toxic content. maybe should be better if you ask to have a section on VATSIM forum too, which is definetely much better, cause this is a section for all VATSimmers. 2-in the past was possible get charts also for Italian airports, why now aren't anymore visible? In addition for some airports was made some mistakes about the position of these charts. Some charts for departure procedures was insert also in GEN or APP section.