The steps necessary to enter your first flight are described here.
Create a database to store the flight log data.
Enter a pilot, who wants to log his or her flights.
Create a new flight log for the pilot.
If the program is terminated before all the steps have been
completed, you may continue when Skylog is started again.
If all steps have been completed you may enter your first flight. To do so open the view for flight logs: menu “View / Open flight logs”. The flight log you created before is now visible in the view. The view has its own menu and toolbar (like all the Skylog views); select “new flight” in the menu or toolbar. The new flight wizard is opened and you may enter your first flight. If you had attendants you have to enter these persons first; you can do so via the Welcome-Page (just as you entered the pilot) or select the menu as described below.
All you flight log's data including persons, aircraft etc. are saved to a database. This database must be selected before the other steps can be completed. Skylog automatically asks for a database if none has been selected yet.
How a database is selected depends on the persistence plugin, which Skylog loaded on startup. The standard plugin uses the databse Db4o, here a file must be selected, which is used to store the data.
Skylog wants to know whether to use an existing database or to create a new one. On the first database selection browse a folder using the file dialog and enter a file name for a new file. Skylog then creates a new database, which is stored into that file.
The database is automatically remembered for the next start of Skylog and the database is automatically opened on startup.
The function is available using the menu “Skylog / New database ...” or “Skylog / Open database ...”.
You have to select a database first. The function is available using the menu “Skylog / New ... / person” or the menu in the persons view.
You have to enter the first name, the name, and the gender of the person. If the person should own a flight log, you must mark the person as a pilot, select “yes” in the combo box for piloting.
To create a flight log later the information above is sufficient. The second wizard page holds preferences for the person, e.g. his or her home base or the preferred aircraft. Right now no airfields or aircraft are known, thus most of this preferences cannot be set right now. You may add these later any time.
You have to select a pilot and a name. The date is used to order the flight logs; it is replaced by the date of the first flight in the log when that flight is added.
If you cannot select a person as owner and you have entered at least one person, you probably did not mark the person as pilot, see above.
You must enter the aircraft's registration, select (Skylog knows a few types independent of earlier inputs) or enter the type of aircraft, and you have to enter the manufacturer. Type details and the name or optional.
Airfields are imported from a text file which defines one airfield per line. A line has four fields separated by semicolons: its ICAO registration, name, latitude, and longitude.
In the wizard select the file holding the airfields and choose an encoding. The encoding is critical if the name contains special character (e.g. german umlauts). It is also important for recognizing the file's structure (end of line). European text files are often “ISO-8859-1” encoded.
For your first import the options are irrelevant. If you are sure the file holding the airfields is of the correct structure but there are error messages when importing the file, try again with another encoding. Then select the option to replace existing airfields.
A file with german airfields is part of the Skylog distribution. The file is named “airports_DE.txt”. This file is from the FluPP web page; see http://flupp.fl.funpic.de/airports/ for more file with airfields of many countries.