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Main Forum - Helicopter Talk R/C Helicopters and the people who fly them. VENDOR TOPICS DO NOT GO HERE. Full Scale Heli threads go in OT please |
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01-19-2015, 10:19 PM | #21 (permalink) |
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Yup. Looks like the Clear Sky Charts we use. hah
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01-19-2015, 10:48 PM | #22 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Yankton, South Dakota
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This really looks great! As a fellow software developer I applaud your efforts. Unfortunately for me the chart is quite accurate for elk river, MN ... all red for the next 7 days! I will be flying some but it will be mostly indoors though if the wind dies down I'm genearly OK with taking a few helix out for a spin in the upper 20s and above. Then again I am a little crazy. I like the idea of being able to set acceptable individual parameters for temperature.
All in all it's a great site! Bookmarked! Jim
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01-20-2015, 12:11 AM | #23 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Jul 2013
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Looks great!
1. Please consider whether the day is sunny or cloudy. Makes a huge difference in experience (at least here in OR). 2. Please show the sunset and sunrise times. Perhaps grey-out, make transparent, or somehow make "less visible" the hours when it's dark. 3. It's slightly confusing whether orange or yellow is better. Not sure how to address this. Maybe add a little green to that yellow, and a little more red to that orange? Just an idea. 4. Hovering over an hour squire could show the details about it (temp, precip, wind, etc). 5. Show a sunny/overcast/rain/snow icon in the hour square. Something like http://www.alessioatzeni.com/meteoco...img/screen.png Last edited by mba83; 01-20-2015 at 04:51 PM.. |
01-20-2015, 07:56 PM | #24 (permalink) |
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I'm keeping track of all your ideas - they are good and much appreciated! For fun, I played with an idea for visually indicating the L/M/H values for the three parameters (temp, wind, and precip) in each square. Here's my first take on it where I divided up each square into three vertical columns, and i show a small gray line for L/M/H desirability. The data is random, but you can see that every green day has all three lines at 'H', i.e., all at the top. Oranges have two M and one H, and yellows have one M and two H. Reds have at least one L.
What do you think? I don't think it conveys enough to make the display more complex like this, but it was a fun hack I also considered using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face , but the mapping to a face wasn't clear. Obviously the mouth would indicate overall desirability, but then again, that's already shown by color. What would the others map to?: Wind: How about blowing hair? But temp and precip? Mouth ":-O" for cold? Just thinking... |
01-20-2015, 08:33 PM | #25 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Jul 2013
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Interesting, but it clutters up the chart and is hard to parse. If you are going to do this, you can stick to colors (show small blocks on the bottom of the hour block, each colored based on the sub-value).
But I think a better solution would be to simply show this detail when the user hovers their cursor above the hour blocks. Either next to the table in a separate div or in a pop-up (tooltip). This web app is neat |
01-20-2015, 08:33 PM | #26 (permalink) |
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simple sliders to adjust thresholds for temp, clouds, and wind preferences would be nice (that cookies would remember). We can all tolerate difference amounts of those. Thus still outputting the neat and simple 3 stoplight colors.
Precip is a no brainer so no slider needed.
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01-20-2015, 10:33 PM | #27 (permalink) |
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I collected all of your very helpful suggestions, with the most popular being:
BTW I *really* like the Clear Sky Chart (pic below). I love the tasty little colored squares, the black background (is that because it's night?) Their approach is more like weather.gov (attached) - with hours going from left to right. The only issue is that this is limited to a few days due to monitor width, or would require scrolling right to see seven days. OTOH, you can pack in more information, which is cool. I was going for more of a glance-and-go thing, but maybe my users are mostly geeks like us here on HF who want some detail. Thoughts? |
01-20-2015, 10:59 PM | #28 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Jan 2012
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If not a slider, it would be nice for one to be able to put in his own thresholds. For instance, my handicap makes it difficult for me to fly when it is cold due to the temperature affecting my hand strength. Also, some folks might think winds of 20+ mph would be fine where others might not want to fly in winds of more than 12 mph. Cloudiness is another factor.
With the temp, I would allow people to put in their ranges, but would use windchill and heat index calculations instead of temperature. For instance, I flew on Saturday when the temp was maybe 57-58. It was sunny and the winds were maybe 5-10 mph. It was a little cool for me but it wasn't a big problem. I flew again today with a temperature of 60-61. However, there were more clouds than sun and the winds were maybe 8-13 mph. Even though it was a little warmer today, it felt colder and flying was more difficult for me. Had I known today was going to "feel" cooler than Saturday, I probably wouldn't have gone.
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01-20-2015, 11:10 PM | #29 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Dec 2006
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Windyty has a really cool wind implementation. Maybe not super applicable to your site, but it's become my goto site for flying weather since wind is the biggest factor here..
https://www.windyty.com/?surface,win...188,-96.541,10 Also AirSportsNet is pretty awesome for quickly and easily showing all the pertinent data to flying. Great for at-a-glance... http://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/laun...te=TX&sta=KTKI Last edited by sl4ppy; 01-21-2015 at 09:12 AM.. |
01-21-2015, 01:00 AM | #30 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Apr 2013
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I think those charts are the best you can get for the short term forecast. You can see the weather trend and get an instant feel for both the flying weather on a day, and the likely conditions underfoot.
But I love your coloured squares for a long term view, so I'd suggest you do both. Have long term squares, with users able to set their thresholds for bad, acceptable and great flying days, and then have a short term meteogram for double checking nearer the time.
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01-21-2015, 08:36 AM | #31 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Sep 2011
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This is great! Look forward to your next version.
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01-21-2015, 09:00 AM | #32 (permalink) |
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This is awesome! I really like the idea and you have done a fantastic job!
What if you modified the chart and blocked it into 2 or 3 hour segments instead of 1 hour, and then added the average temp, precipitation, and wind values in each block. It would be more compact and yield more data to the user. Just my 0.02 cents, keep up the good work, we really appreciate it! Brian
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01-21-2015, 09:33 AM | #33 (permalink) | |
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Quote:
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01-21-2015, 10:37 AM | #35 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Sep 2011
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+1 Hourly. Keep it simple. That's the beauty of your app. If we want lots of detail we can look at an actual weather forecast.
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01-21-2015, 11:02 AM | #36 (permalink) |
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Sorry about that. To convert zip codes to the lat/lon that the weather API needs, I have a csv file that I found online. That file apparently does not have some of those APO zip codes :-( Using an online zip-to-lat/lon service is problematic, but I will revisit it. In the meantime I'll add getting the forecast by lat/lon.
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01-21-2015, 11:10 AM | #37 (permalink) | |
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Quote:
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01-21-2015, 12:56 PM | #38 (permalink) | |
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Join Date: Apr 2009
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As for the OP, I really like the idea. I need a way to overlap that with nap schedules and work to find when I actually can fly (j/k). Do you think you could do a gradient of each color to indicate really low wind (0-3,3-6,6-9), etc. that way we can really know a 1mph day vs 9 mph day? Also, maybe a details option would be cool to see the details for the block.
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01-21-2015, 02:10 PM | #39 (permalink) |
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Join Date: Sep 2013
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This is pretty cool. It would be great if this could end up covering the entire globe - I'm in Europe ;-)
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01-21-2015, 02:17 PM | #40 (permalink) |
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I like this a lot. I'm sure I'm a minority here but being colorblind it's tough to look at. Maybe color picking could be implemented. Have you tried Google maps api? I'm a software developer as well and I used it before on a project.
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