The new version of Air Manager brings an upgrade to the rendering engine where the previously used JavaFX platform was replaced by using OpenGL directly (JavaFX also uses OpenGL but now the team is interacting with OGL direcly).
According to Sim Innovations, this increases the rendering speed by 2x/3x than the previous versions of Air Manager. While this may not be noticeable by users with higher-end systems, it may help you if you are, for example, using a lower end computer for instrument display.
Air Player
Sim Innovations is also releasing a new piece of interesting software for cockpit builders. The company states that it's pretty much a lightweight version of Air Manager, without interface. It's sole purpose is to run panels of instruments, which doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize you can get it to run on a Raspberry Pi, for example.
This allows you have your own dedicated panel computer for a very affordable price (usually around $60-$70) that will allow you not only to display the panels but also to connect hardware parts such as switches, buttons, LEDs, rotary encoders, pretty much everything you need to build your own 'pit.
Where to get Air Manager 3.0 and Air Player
You can learn more about the beta program and these 2 programs at the Sim Innovations wiki.
Please bear in mind that Air Player is not available at the time we publish this news so you might have to wait a bit until you can get your hands on it.
