FlightService 1.1 (iTunes link) went live on iTunes last night. The big news in this update is that it now contains runway information for over 10,000 airports worldwide.

Information available for each runway includes length and heading. If there is an ILS available, then that information (frequency, identifier and ILS heading) is also included.

This update also contains some database revisions. So if you are a 1.0 user, the first time you launch 1.1, the database on your iPhone will be updated with the new and updated data.

Much progress has been made on version 1.2 which I hope will be released sometime in September.

Well, now it’s time to change it. Please make a note of our new office phone number: (616) 389-0737. Kind of catchy, isn’t it?

The old number will work for a short while longer, but please start using the new one as soon as practical. Thanks.

FlightService (iTunes link) our latest application for iPhone/iPodTouch is now available on iTunes.

While definitely not for everyone, this app is a great help or reference for the Pilot or even Sim Pilot. It contains important information for over 13,000 airports and navigation aids.

Name, Frequency, Latitude/Longitude are all included for VORs and elevation and ATIS frequency is also included for airports. There is also an option to maintain a list of favorites for information that you plan on accessing frequently.

There are two features that set FlightService apart from other apps that provide a similar service:

• All the information is stored on your device. Unlike some programs, no Internet connection is required to access the information via a web service of other lookup.
• Our unique free-text search allows you to quickly find the information you are looking for whether searching by name, identifier or combination of both.

We’ve already received some requests to add runway/ILS frequency information and that will definitely be included in the next update.

My personal favorite is Stanza. There are a lot of reasons, but the main ones include the ability to choose whatever font I want, variably set the font size and text alignment. There’s more but those are the big ones that, to me, make reading text in Stanza a much more enjoyable experience.

But the question that I’m thinking about now is whether or not that clarity is worth the significantly higher book cost.

For example, the book that I’m currently reading in “iKindle” is Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany. The kindle version costs $9.99 from Amazon.

If I wanted to read that same book in Stanza, I would have needed to purchase it though FictionWise. The cost would have been almost double at $17.95 (and that’s generously considering FictionWise’s “rebate” which is just a discount on your next purchase as an actual reduction in the original book’s cost).

I’m hopeful that the other e-book resellers will get a little more aggressive in trying to match Amazon’s Kindle pricing. Alternately, I would be satisfied with some significant improvement in the customization and readability features of their iPhone app.

I’m basically now using the Google cloud as the intermediary for syncing between my BlackBerry and my computer. So, I’m using Spanning Sync for the sync between my Mac and Google and then Google Sync for Blackberry to handle the syncing between Google and my BlackBerry.

This has proven to be significantly more reliable then the Missing Sync with the side benefit of having the calendar and contacts associated with my GAFYD account also in sync.

There was really only one issue that required some effort to get resolved and that was the handling of repeating events where one of the events has changed.

For example, I have a weekly meeting that I scheduled in iCal as a weekly repeating event for the whole year. Occasionally this meeting is moved to a different date or time or cancelled altogether.

Unfortunately, these irregularities didn’t sync well with Google. Some didn’t show up at all, some showed up on their “regularly scheduled” time instead of their individual modifications. Working around this problem was as simple as deleting them out of iCal and then creating them in Google Calendar and then doing a sync.

Spanning Sync also has an excellent referral program. Basically, if your purchase Spanning Sync with a referral code, you save $5 and the person’s code that you used (ideally mine: P4QHEM) also gets $5.

So, just in case you missed it in the last paragraph that code is P4QHEM. Even easier just click on the lovely image above.

The big change is that pace can now be entered and calculated as minutes per kilometre or minutes per mile. Previously, users were limited to minutes per mile.

The next version will add at least one and hopefully two language localizations as well as allow for custom entry of distances instead of have to select from a preset list.

I’m happy to announce that My Pace (iTunes link) – the iPhone/iPod Touch version of Race Pace is now available on the iTunes App Store. It’s 99 cents.

There are two main differences between My Pace and Race Pace. The first (and this is the biggest limitation of My Pace) is that you have to choose from a preset list of distances as opposed to being able to enter a custom distance as you can in Race Pace. The second is that pace is automatically calculated as “minutes per mile”.

We hope to remedy both of those differences in an update already under development.

In the meantime and please let us know what you think.

The observant may also notice a new section of the site that contains an early beta version of a new Mac application that we’ve been working on.

The scariest part of the redesign process was using Archive.org’s way back machine to look at the different incarnations the Third Coast site has had dating back to 2002. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now if we only had a logo . . .

To preface this, here’s a screen shot of the details of my iTunes library:

So, you can see with almost 30,000 songs and 87 days worth of music that chances of two even remotely related songs coming up next to each other should be relatively slim.

But, check this out shot from my iTunes Party Shuffle window:

The same song played twice in a row! Now granted, it’s a great song that should be played multiple times, but still. I guess the odds of the same song playing twice are about 1 in 29,029 (the same as any specific song playing right after the first Karen), but still very surprising.

In iTunes preferences under the Playback tab, there is an option for “Smart Shuffling” that supposedly reduces the chances of songs from the same artist or from the same album being played sequentially. I have that setting all the way to “less likely” but not only did we get the same album and the same artist, but the same song too.

The fact that I’ve just written this much about the occasion probably means that I spend a little too much time obsessing about my music collection (or maybe that I Party Shuffle a little too often).

After 561.88 miles of running spread across 151 separate runs, the sensor in my Nike + iPod Sports Kit has bitten the dust. It gave me a warning before beginning my last run.

It didn’t say “I’m dead, don’t use me.” It just said, the sensor’s battery was very low and replace it soon.

Well, I didn’t replace it soon enough, because it didn’t even make it through that run. Is there any worse feeling of futility as finishing a good run and finding out that it will not become part of your Nike+ running log?

If it weren’t for the nagging pain behind my right kneecap, it would be like the run never happened.

Spring can’t get here soon enough; I hate the treadmill life.