Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots(apps.apple.com)

12 points by siralonso 5 years ago | 12 comments

c1yd3i 5 years ago |

Very cool! Everything looks great. The first widget I'm actually going to use.

When iOS 14 came out, I was disappointed when ForeFlight didn't have something like this ready.

Riffing on ideas:

It'd be cool if the wind direction in the smart view was relative to your phone's orientation. I'm also imagining a little rendering of a runway and a windsock. TAFs would be a cool and challenging next step? A widget that'd some how give an idea of the latest surface analysis?

siralonso 5 years ago | |

Me too! The lack of ForeFlight widgets was the reason I started hacking on this, actually.

Love the idea of showing wind direction relative to the phone - one challenge with this is that you're not allowed to do any animation in widgets (for power reasons, I assume?). Hopefully they'll open this up a bit more in the future.

+1 on a runway visualization - it would be really useful to see the crosswind component (life or death for my tailwheel training, haha). Ditto for TAFs and surface analysis.

Thanks for the feedback and feature suggestions!

siralonso 5 years ago |

Hi all! This was a side project I worked on over the last few months while learning to fly in South Dakota. I learned a lot about working with Widgets and SwiftUI, and I hope to do a writeup on those soon. Feel free to ask me anything, and if you're a pilot I hope you take it for a spin!

JCBird1012 5 years ago |

Congrats on the new PPL!

I love the app so far - but it would be amazing if the widget was location aware and could grab the METAR for the nearest reporting airport (that might be some work, but doable)

Thanks again and put all that App Store proceeds to good taildragger time! ;)

siralonso 5 years ago | |

Thanks! Onwards to the instrument rating.

That's a great idea RE: nearest reporting airport - I've put it on the list to explore for the next version.

Haha, roger wilco on the taildragger time.

dzhiurgis 5 years ago |

Not including age of information / timestamp seems risky

siralonso 5 years ago | |

Good callout. I've got a feature coming to show age on the widget face, but for now you can tap the widget to view the full version, which includes the age and timestamp.

lawrenceduk 5 years ago |

Just to be a pain... as an instrument-rated pilot could the widget have the cloud heights on it visually? Maybe the top of the widget is 5,000 feet or something.

siralonso 5 years ago | |

Not a pain at all - I did explore this, but I wasn't really happy with the result - which may have been because I was trying to cram it in with the existing information. Having an alternative layout that is more cloud-centric instead of wind-centric might be the ticket. I'll see what I can do. Thanks!

atarian 5 years ago |

Looks cool! As a non-pilot, I would be really interested in learning what this does.

siralonso 5 years ago | |

Thanks! METARs [1] are standardized weather reports that pilots use to evaluate current conditions. They're often reported from stations located at airports, and include (among other things) wind direction, cloud bases, temperature/dewpoint, current altimeter setting, etc. They look like this in raw text form:

KMDS 150935Z AUTO 30009KT 10SM CLR M02/M06 A3007 RMK AO2

This app parses METARs into a visual representation, and displays it in a widget on your home screen. Useful for keeping tabs on current conditions!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR

lawrenceduk 5 years ago |

Nice! Bought it. Cool!