As part of the port to Apple, Flowx has undergone a major rewrite. In this port to Apple, I have added an Eclipse feature to show the path and shadow of the looming Total Solar Eclipse in North America on the 8th of April. Unfortunately, this Eclipse feature will not make to the general Android release in time. Hence, I am releasing this super-alpha release which has bugs and missing features.
If you’re interested in Alpha Testing and/or the Eclipse feature, send me your Google Play email and I’ll add you to the list of testers.
Note: you will lose all your places, graphs and settings. The alpha release will be like a new install. I haven’t implemented any migration.
Missing Features:
Migrations from Flowx 3 to Flowx 4.
ECMWF HRES 0.25 resolution (next release)
Graph Editor (Mostly done - coming soon)
Travel Mode
Widget
Sun/Moon
Translations
Right-to-left layout
Share - screenshot or movie.
Pro subscriptions but you can manually turn Gold Pro on/off in settings.
Bugs (which I plan to fix next):
the map can go blank after a while in the background. Fix: restart Flowx.
zoom/panning can be finicky.
This is a very exciting step because it’s the start of the end of this major rewrite which started 3 years ago. Once we complete this release to Android it opens up the door to some cool data, features, a desktop version and possibly, a web version.
Just a Partial
but then again every night I see total eclipse when the sun drops below the mountains causing total darkness tell morning . when I was way younger long before internet I lived in Oregon we got to see the actual total eclipse was pretty cool.
I rode my Honda Goldwing to McMinnville OR in August 2017 from Vancouver island with my partner to witness the total solar eclipse. It was awesome and well worth the ride south!
Where I live in Indiana, I had almost 4 minutes of totality and clear weather by stepping out my front door. My sister in Texas had almost 4 minutes of totality in her pasture, though in mostly cloudy weather. My family is fairly scattered, but both my brothers and 2 of my kids drove varying distances to see totality. Another sister and daughter saw it something like 98% total in Chicago. Of myself and my 4 kids and 4 sibs, the only one to miss it completely was one of my sons and his family in Argentina. The weather varied, but all 6 of us where it was total saw the corona at least briefly. Amazing.
And before the eclipse I spent a lot of time on FlowX being a family meteorological resource.
Just had a look at this. Some things look like a definite improvement, others not so much:
Wind vectors and wavefronts seem a lot smaller on the map, and almost invisible.
The indicator menus below the map stay open when a different one is selected.
Composing the layout of graphs is a bit painful, as there’s no way of rearranging them, and opening a new one opens it above the selected graph (somewhat counterintuitively).
The major rewrite started 3+ years ago. It was the port to Apple. I added Eclipse to the Apple code but the code wasn’t ready for an Android release because it has many feature that weren’t implemented in the new code. So I released it as alpha to Android users who wanted Eclipse could use the eclipse feature. It was too hard to implement it in the old Android code.
Are there any builds more recent than the one from May?
Wanted to test this new version as I’ve been paying for the app for years and I’m still missing the feature I’ve asked about since day 1, “feels like” or wet bulb temperature. I live in a hot area near sea and you can’t really judge what tomorrow will be like by just looking at temperature. I know Duarte has been busy with the iOS release and the rewrite on Android but I’d have thought a data point that is a simple math function over two existing data points would be trivial to implement?
In any case, it seems this alpha version doesn’t support widgets, which is how I use the app, so I’ll have to wait to join the testing
“feels like” and “wet bulb” are just two of many many “trivial” features users have asked for. My todo list has hundreds of tasks (features and bugs) on it.
And no, it’s not trivial to implement a simple math function over two existing points in a generic way. Some data sources don’t have all the data required or have a different set of required data, then you have to ensure all the units of the data are the appropriate units for the equations. I have implemented this in the new code already and it wasn’t trivial.
Just to clarify something - even though “feels like” is implemented in the new code, it isn’t switched on so you won’t see it in alpha.
I have implemented code design or capability for many new features but I don’t plan to turn them on immediately. I want to have feature parity first, then turn on features one-by-one. This makes it easier to debug, fix issues, etc…
It may be worth having this type of feature in an “experiments” part of the settings users can turn on knowing it comes without guarantees. I’d be happy to have this feature enabled even if it breaks for some combination of data sources. You can then see who is actually using these experimental features and prioritize accordingly
That is actually a worse situation. I’ve done this a couple of times before. I still have to maintain the code and work around it. I still have to find the eclipse data and process it. In the end it will break and people will still email me asking for it to be fixed. So either I do it properly or not at all.
