Electronic Time table is *$£#&*#!!!!!
 

i'm at the end of my tether with the Star alliance electronic timetable and i'm wondering if it's merely just my laptop that's causing me trouble or whether that it's Star alliance's programming that is simply just bollocks.

it tries to update itse;f automatically. before it actually does this is asks "do you want to update?".... if you click "no", it goes and does it anyway. if you click "yes", it goes ahead and updates. grrr.

it got to the point, i used the toggle switch to let me manually choose when to update my timetable. problem solved.. or so i thought. now it says periodically "updates disabled; continue anyway?". WHAT! i don't want reminders... double grrr!

and if you try and click "close" or "no", the pop up box keeps springing up repeatedly until you give in and update.

now, forgive me, but this is beyond a joke from an organisation such as star alliance and i'm disgusted that they are acting like a cheap internet outfit.

i'm uninstalling.... if it will let me.

i am so angry.

so the question is.... anyone else have this problem? will star alliance listen to complaints and who should they go to?


grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I've been using the StarAlliance Electronic timetable regularly both on a PC and laptop. I've not had any of the problems you've experienced. I always update using the manual update option however.
Have you tried uninstalling and reindownloading a new copy form the StarAlliance website and installing that instead?

Once I opted for the automatic version to regret immediately.

You're better off with the manual version. ;)

It is their "automatic conduit" that is the problem. It is really very badly written and doesn't act logically. Given these are not really updates but entire program replacements, just do it manually and don't bother installing the conduit.

The only electronic timetable they got right is the Palm one, it is nice and easy to use. The PC app is generally a badly written piece of software, and the PocketPC one is some ugly hack implementing a web-server on the device...
The two things I do miss from the Palm timetible is the ability to show flight duration and equipment type for a given flight.

I too have been caught out by the "automatic conduit"
I now update manually each Monday.
At least you can view a *A timetable in pdf with all carriers listed in one file.

I agree, the Palm version was much better and easier to use.

You might be interested in this which I came across a few days ago. It's a Palm emulator for Pocket PC. I've read that it doesn't work with conduits, but I assume you can just manually reinstall the latest version.

It does seem to work, although I only tried it with the sample apps they provided, and I discovered the next day that my SD card was badly corrupted :( (though I think this was probably a coincidence)

Star Alliance Palm Timetable
 

The Palm timetable does have the equipment type. What it lacks is the classes of service (such as FCY, JY, etc).

It has the departure and arrival times, so one can figure out the flight duration.

I use it constantly and it has been very reliable.

No problems for me so far.

I've installed it on two diferent PCs and it works fine BUT I update the program (Screensaver, timetable, RTW calc) manually.

As pointed above, Star alliance progs could hav been slicker in that it could have been an 'update' instead of a 'full prog' install.

Other bugs with Star Alliance timetable
 

Not quite the same problem, but related to the original topic, so I didn't want to open another thread.

I just downloaded the Staralliance timetable (PC version, not the PDF) and already hate it! I'm not sure what I do wrong or whether this is a bug and might affect other routes as well, but I am trying to plan a trip to South America and don't know anything about which routes are served by which airline.

So, I typed in LIM-SCL and it would come up with some options via GRU. But for the return it never seems to find any flight options. I would get an error message saying:

Certain destinations do not have daily flights. Please use Ctrl+ or Ctrl- to change the date (by the way that doesn't seem to work either ^ )..

But I searched for every day of the week and keep getting the same error message. If you then search only for LIM-GRU and GRU-SCL you will, of course, find the flights, but for what's the point of having a timetable if you need to know the schedules and flights already to be able to use it? :mad:

I just wonder how many other bugs this thing has as I doubt that I found the only bug in the system...

Otherwise I like the version, it's really fast for looking up connections, however, I would like to know what class of service are offered in each route. But even the online PDF does not show this.

Is there not real route map somewhere online a la Qantas where you can select a city and it will show you (on the map) to which airports you can fly from this city? I tried the UA website, but it only has a map with airports, but no routes shown on the map. Any other suggestions?

It's not coming up for you because there are no same day connecting flight options SCL-LIM.
The "quickest" connection is an overnight 13 hour wait at GRU but as it's not same day and probably with the lengthy transit involved, it won't show up as a connection.

If all connections of say 10 hours or more for all 16 partners combinations worldwide were included, it would probably flood the system. I'm guessing there is some sort of "cutoff" time in length of hours the system looks for a connection to avoid saturation of options and system overload.

Ahh, you are absolutely right, Al B. It must be a cut off with the connection time for these two flights.

By the way I found a good route map for South America on the Varig website. It doesn't show the AC flight SCL-EZE e.g., but I think it's good enough for my purpose. Actually, there are not that many flights on *Alliance in South America apart from the Varig flights within Brazil and to the capitals of the sourrounding countries...quite disappointing. :( ...whish Lan Chile would be *A member...

The automatic update option stinks. I just bookmark http://www.startimetable.com/star.exe and just go there to update. No need to even star the timetable to click on the manual update.