About page, contact, and finding your way around

A few things that don't affect how you plan a flight but make the site easier to understand.

About

Landing on the map without context can feel a bit mysterious. The route is there, the day/night line moves, but it's not obvious what you're supposed to do with it.

The same explanation kept coming up whenever someone was shown the app for the first time. At some point it made more sense to just put it on the site. The About page explains the idea in plain terms. It's also useful when someone shares a FlightSide link and the person receiving it doesn't know what they're looking at.

The footer now shows when the airport dataset was last updated. FlightSide uses a public list of airports and timezones, and timezone data is what drives the sun calculations. Airports occasionally change timezone rules, especially around daylight saving time decisions. If the data is a year out of date, the sun exposure result could be off by an hour for affected routes. Airports also go in and out of service. The date makes it clear how much to trust what you're seeing.

Contact

There was no way to reach out. Now there's a simple contact page where you can leave a short note. Linked from the footer and from the journal.

The first feedback came from people who'd been shown the app directly. A contact page is a small thing, but it felt wrong to have no way for anyone else to say something.

Navigation

Most people open FlightSide in the middle of booking something, check a route, then move on. When you navigate to another page and come back, you don't lose your place.

If you're sharing a link with someone who hasn't used FlightSide before, the About page is the quickest way to get them oriented.