Drop-Down Favorites

FlightAware Feature Requests and Ideas
1

Having just read the topic on increasing ‘My FlightAware’ aircraft to 10 or 20 or 30 or more and having been through repetitive type-ins of one of my favorite airports this afternoon, I wonder if it is time to look at a possible new approach.

I’d like to propose a drop-down menu structure based on the browser ‘Favorites’ theme. In that way, one could have an indefinite number of flights, airports, airport pairs, aircraft types, and (later) airline fleets accessible with the click of a mouse (no type-ins needed). The list should be easy to add to and easy to delete an entry (just as browsers do). FA should recognize, from the page URL, what type of item is being selected and group it with others of the same type.

All this is, really, is adding URL favorites, with simplified page titles, into a drop-down menu.

What brought this idea on is that I was following two separate aircraft, each with an NHL team, from Vancouver to Dallas. They departed and arrived within several minutes of each other and were generally separated from each other by about 25 miles.

I was trying to follow them on the ‘big’ map to get both planes and any others in the area onto the same map. Thus I was always looking for small airport codes over Idaho, Colorado, Texas panhandle, and Oklahoma as a practical way to scroll the big map as the flights continued south. Since that wasn’t always smooth and since I wasn’t always able to stay at the computer during the entire flight duration, I found myself repeatedly typing in the same airport codes or flight numbers. That’s when I thought there’s gotta be a better way — and, ah-hah :bulb: a drop-down favorite menu.

Btw, does anyone know of a web site with state maps featuring airport locations and codes? For Colorado, I found this wonderful site http://www.colorado-aeronautics.org/aeromap.htm but the best I could do in Oklahoma was a list of cities with airports, not helpful if you don’t know which are in the southwest corner of the state.

Daniel, Karl, and Mark – put Drop-Down Favorites on your hot-list for development. Thanks. :smiley:

2

One problem with this is how browsers handle dropdown boxes: you can’t have a dropdown box that also allows you to enter arbitrary text, so now you need two items (box and dropdown) instead of one. Using the browser’s form caching seems like a more elegant and functional way to do this.

3

I was thinking of the more traditional drop-down “Favorite” context. One would have had to already visited a page before setting it as a “favorite”. Any initial visit to a page would have to by typed in via entry box, as you point out.

However, long-time users are often visiting the same pages day after day. For them, a mouse point/click is very efficient, especially considering that one has to point and click inside the entry box before one can type anything.

This is not an “either/or” suggestion. We really need both.