If you haven’t tried Flighty, you should. And today, it adds a big upgrade.
First, some background: Flighty is an app for iPhone and Mac. It’s a simple but highly effective way to stay on top of any flights you’re taking. You can enter your next flight’s details easily enough, or it will find them, with your permission, in your calendar or from Tripit, for instance.
Flighty does its work and shows your next travel in a home screen widget or lock screen widget, for instance. It’ll say, “2 Days to Los Angeles” on the lock screen while the home screen the widget shows the date and time of the flight, destination and flight number, plus the booking reference if you’ve put that in.
Once that’s done, Flighty tells you everything: the plane, performance on that route in the last two months, and plenty of geeky details, near to the time, such as tail number and how old the plane is.
That’s all fun, but the really useful stuff comes on the day of departure. Open the app for a few seconds or more in the hours before take-off and, on an iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, it takes over the Dynamic Island, counting down the time to wheels up and when you’re aloft showing the progress of the flight. It very often displays the gate number before the airline’s app and even sometimes before the airport display boards.
Now, a big upgrade has just been launched which makes it super-easy to share your flight details and progress with friends or family. Previously, sharing flight information meant getting involved in confirmation emails, and hoping your friend knows what to do with them.
With Flighty 3.0, you connect with that friend once, sending an invitation to someone to become your “Flighty friend”. And that’s it. When the friend opens Flighty, they’ll see your details (and it’ll be your name, not the flight number), updated when things change. So, they’ll see if you’re delayed, if the flight is cancelled, and shoe their progress on a live flight map.
This is not public, so it doesn’t work as a social network. The information is only shared privately.
It looks great, is easy to use and has lots of neat personalization: your profile photo or Memoji shows on your friend’s phone.
Flighty is free, though a paid-for Pro version costing from $49 a year adds extra features such as no ads, faster alerts and more lock screen updates. This new additional feature is free.
Flighty is built to make flying easier, whether that’s having your booking reference easily available or the brilliant simplicity of the Dynamic Island interactions. For me, it’s one of those apps I can’t quite manage without any more.
Read the full article here
