I know there are those who cling to the old North up, paper chart type set-up. I just don't know why.
Different brains? I can't for the life of me follow track up, either on a map or on Skydemon, it has to be north up otherwise I may as well just switch it off. Don't know how people do it, you must be wired up differently to me. Having said that my flying buddy can't do it north up, it totally throws him. Mind you he's a bit weird.
Re carrying a paper map etc. I always carry a marked up map and paper plog. I find that marking the map up gets the route and any problem areas into my head, plus there's always the chance that the Iphone or whatever will go tits up as happened to me a few weeks ago. I was flying an Aerobat with a mate to go for a pub lunch somewhere. I had the iphone suckered to the side window. I had just taken off and at 995' precisely (I read it on the flight log later) the side window blew open and the iphone was sucked out of the a/c.
'Bugger' and other stronger expletives issued forth. Luckily I could see I was over open ground and the chances of it knobbling someone were pretty slim. So I grabbed the map and flew to where we were going and back the old fashioned way which was quite novel actually. Kind of put the dampers on the pub lunch though.
On returning to my home airfield I was talking about what happened when one of the guys asked me if I had 'find my iphone' switched on. I had, and in short order using the club computer I found the location in a field a few miles away, it was still transmitting. I took a screen shot of the sat location and printed it out, then worked out how close I could get in the car. I walked across a few fields and almost walked straight to it. There wasn't a scratch on it although the screen was blank. I had a new screen put on for £50 and it works perfectly. It had logged the flight and where you can see the virtual radar there's a vertical line where it dropped out of the a/c and max altitude, 995'!
I have since invested in a yoke mount for it. It's not going fly away again.