Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#1

Post by siralonso » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

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

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#2

Post by siralonso » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

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!

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#3

Post by c1yd3i » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

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?

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#4

Post by JCBird1012 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

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! ;)

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#5

Post by dzhiurgis » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

Not including age of information / timestamp seems risky

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#6

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

siralonso wrote: post #2

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!

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#7

Post by atarian » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

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

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#8

Post by lawrenceduk » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

Nice! Bought it. Cool!

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#9

Post by lawrenceduk » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

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.

Re: Show HN: iOS14 weather (METAR) widgets for pilots

#10

Post by siralonso » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

c1yd3i wrote: post #3

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 so…

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!