Your plans now know what's in your parts drawers

You're on page 14 of the fuselage plans, counting rivet spacing, and there's a callout: F-1074. You know roughly what it is. What you don't know is whether it came in the kit, whether you've already unpacked it, or which drawer it went into eight months ago. So you put the drawing down, open the inventory, type the number in, and by the time you've found it you've lost your place on the sheet.

That round trip is gone. Tap the part number on the drawing.

What actually changed

Part numbers are links now. Every part number BenchLog recognises on a plan sheet is rendered as a link. Tap one and you get its name, its number, where it lives in your inventory and how many you have — without leaving the page you were reading.

The useful part is what happens when the answer isn't "it's in drawer 3". A part that's in your inventory with nothing on the shelf says no stock. A part BenchLog has never heard of says not imported. Those are two very different problems — one means order it, the other means you never told the tool about it — and a viewer that lumped them together as "nothing found" would be worse than useless when you're deciding what to put in a cart.

Nothing gets pre-indexed for this. The numbers are read out of the sheet's own text as you scroll, which means it works on drawings you uploaded a year ago without you doing anything. Every occurrence on a page is linked, not just the first one.

Pinch-to-zoom lands where you pinched. It didn't, before. Zooming out near the start of a sheet could drop you on a different page entirely, which is a special kind of infuriating when you were mid-measurement.

The cause turned out to be that the zoom preview was writing cheques the finished layout couldn't cash: while your fingers were on the glass it would happily slide the drawing past the top of the window, then snap back on release to somewhere the page could actually sit. Up to 245 pixels of snap — comfortably enough to swap the page under your thumb. Now the preview is clamped to exactly what the release will produce, so what you see while pinching is what you get when you let go.

Double-tap to zoom. Tap twice on a spot to jump to full width, twice more to zoom in on it. It respects what you tapped, so double-tapping a callout puts that callout in front of you and not the middle of the page.

Fit page does something when you press it twice. Previously, scrolling away and pressing Fit again did precisely nothing — every page in a section is the same size, so the zoom level was already correct and it quietly decided there was no work to do. It re-frames the current page now, whether or not the zoom changes.

Long sections open faster. The reader used to draw every page of a section up front. A forty-page section meant forty full-resolution renders before it settled, and enough memory to make a tablet think hard about it. Now it draws the pages near you and keeps the rest as correctly-sized blanks until you get there. Scroll position, the page counter and deep links all behave exactly as before — the pages are still all there, they're just not all painted at once.

Sheets are sharper, and the text is selectable. Plan sheets render at your display's real resolution at normal zoom instead of a flat, conservative cap. And the text on a sheet is text now — select a callout or a part number and copy it, the way you would in any other PDF viewer. Selection stays out of the way while you're annotating or placing a marker.

You can reach the left edge of a wide sheet. Zoom a landscape drawing wider than your screen and the left margin used to be simply unreachable, no matter how you scrolled. Centring bug. Fixed.

While we're here: BenchLog draws your wiring too

This has been quietly true for a while and never properly announced, so: BenchLog includes a full wiring and harness tool. Not a sketchpad — an actual schematic editor. Devices from a searchable library with real pinouts, wires with gauge and colour, net labels that span sheets, shields with termination types, multi-sheet projects, and an issue checker that tells you when you've left a pin floating or double-landed a connection.

From that schematic it derives a harness view — the same electrical model drawn as the physical bundle you'll actually lay out on a board, with branch points and connector ends. And it exports: PDF and SVG that match the editor exactly, plus Excel pin lists with a per-connector build sheet for each D-sub you have to crimp.

Garmin's new AXIS displays are in the library. All three variants of the GDU 116 — 116B, 116C and 116NC — with full connector pinouts taken from Garmin's install manual (190-03123-20), checked against Rev. 3. J1011 and J1012 on every variant; J1013 and J1015 on the 116C and 116NC, which is where the ARINC 429 channels, the RS-485 lines and the four-place audio panel live. Twisted pairs are tagged, so the pin-list export's twist-group column fills itself in.

Each AXIS drops onto the canvas pre-split into one block per physical D-sub — two blocks for the 116B, four for the others — instead of one enormous box you then have to work around. Much closer to how you'd actually draw it.

One thing worth passing on if you're working from the same manual: its summary tables don't always agree with its own detailed pin tables. In Rev. 3 the RS-232 summary (Table A-12) puts RS-232 OUT 7 on J1013 pin 57 — but pin 57 is RS-232 IN 7, as that same table says two rows earlier; the output is pin 58. It also puts RS-232 OUT 8 on J1011, a nine-pin connector, at pin 61. Both of those belong to J1013, and the detailed table and the interconnect drawings agree on that. Where the two disagree, trust the detailed per-connector table — that's what the library is built from.

Also in the wiring tool this round:

• The harness view prints. There's a proper PDF export dialog now instead of two fixed menu items — pick sheets, pick what's labelled, and optionally include a cable summary and wire summary page.
• Mac users: schematic and harness pages export properly. They were coming out blank in Safari — the pages were sized in viewport units, which Safari measures against the wrong box inside a print frame. Sized in millimetres now, which no browser can misread.
• Harness device blocks are much narrower, sized to the connector rows they actually show rather than inheriting the schematic block's width.
• Reset layout, per-node reset to automatic, and per-node orientation control, for when the automatic harness layout and your intentions diverge.
• The Inspector opens itself when you select something while it's collapsed, instead of waiting for you to notice.
• Shield termination is a dropdown — pick ground, floating or backshell and the tool arms in the same click.

Also fixed this round

• Manual session entries take a start and end time, like the edit form always did, with the duration calculated underneath instead of typed in.
• Related, and worse than it sounds: manually-added sessions used to be silently stamped 12:00. The old form only asked for a date and a duration, so it anchored everything at noon — every manual entry you've logged has a fictional start time, and editing one showed you that fiction. What you pick is now what gets saved.
• Sessions last 14 days instead of 3, and there's a "Remember me on this device" box for 90. Same token as before, just not expiring while you're still using it.

And a note about this notice

There's now a What's New item in the navigation, and a short summary like this one appears once when something worth mentioning ships. Dismiss it and it stays dismissed. It exists because the honest answer to "did you know BenchLog does that now?" was usually no — which is, after all, how a whole wiring tool went unannounced.

What's next

The part lookup currently tells you what you have. The obvious next step is telling you what a page needs before you start — open a sheet, see the shortages, order once instead of three times.

On the wiring side, the harness view is still the appetiser for the real goal: a printable, 1:1 harness board you can lay wire on directly. And the device library only grows if people ask, so if the avionics you're installing aren't in there, say so.

As always: bugs and complaints go straight to the top of the list.