I have just pushed a new ATC-pie version for download. The main new feature in this v1.8.0 is telephone land lines in multi-player sessions (FlightGear and FSD). It allows to communicate with other ATCs by voice, directly placing and answering calls from the ATC coordination dock. The following excerpt from the ATC-pie quick reference gives you a hint of the efficient integrated switchboard:
Notes on land line switching:
- you can only talk to one ATC at a time but may place multiple outgoing calls;
- answering an incoming call while already in a call drops the one in progress, allowing to pick it back up as long as the other party holds the line ("still incoming");
- if a call you placed is answered while you are in another call, the former switches to show as an incoming call without interrupting the one in progress;
- conversely, if an incoming call you answer turns to "placed" (outgoing only) instead of "in progress", the other party was already on the phone and is now seeing an incoming call from you.
Also, CPDLC has been consolidated and the corresponding FlightGear extension to allow MP aircraft to interact with the feature is now merged to "next", i.e. currently under test and staged for the next FG release this year. See this page for more info and further links. In particular, check out the CPDLC generic dialog add-on to play with the feature (FG "next" required at this time).
In ATC-pie, you can manually compose CPDLC messages from an open dialogue window. But the new "ALT" modifier key was introduced to combine with several mouse gestures conveniently. See the quick ref for more.