Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

earth.nullschool.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

#31

Post by pmarreck »

jcoffland wrote: post #15
jenhsun wrote: post #2

Thanks, but I prefer this https://www.windyty.com/

The interface on windyty.com is better. It does not have the problem of filling up your browser's history with every move you make. I would like to be able to see the color scale key with out also having to open the full control panel.

Every new view should get a URL. That makes every view linkable. People who do not do this are actually violating the spirit of the HTML/URL specs. The fact that you see your browser history as polluted is an implementation detail that could be rectified by simply collapsing all consecutive URL's from the same domain over N url's into a hierarchical dropdown.

Re: A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

#32

Post by dandelany »

Keyframe wrote: post #26

That's really cool, but does it really have to reload data on every viewport move/change? I use somewhat similar app for android made by Croatian Ministry of Maritime Affairs, Transport and Infrastructure https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=hr.mppi.nis&ah... There's also iOS version https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nautical-info-service-croati... Really handy when you're out there.

It doesn't reload data - it just stops the particle system advection and restarts it when you're done moving.

And yes, this is pretty necessary (at least it's quite hard to work around). To maintain the same view during viewport movement, it would have to keep track of all the particle trails in lat/long space and re-project them all to the new view. But this is implemented in canvas, so the trails (ie. particle histories) are likely not stored in their entirety - more likely, the system keeps track of only the particle's current position, and the trails are accomplished by drawing new line segments over the old on each frame. Yes, it would be technically possible to keep track of each particle's full history, and to re-project them all during interaction, but it would be pretty slow.

(I didn't make this, but I've written a very similar particle system in canvas and ran into similar issues)

Re: A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

#33

Post by dandelany »

If you're interested in playing with this visualization technique (particle advection in vector fields) outside the context of geospatial applications - I built this tool called "Vector Toy" which allows you to visualize any given (2D) vector field this way: http://dandelany.github.io/vector-toy/ - note that the functions on the right side are editable.

Re: A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

#36

Post by dandelany »

pmarreck wrote: post #31
jcoffland wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interface on windyty.com is better. It does not have the problem of filling up your browser's history with every move you make. I would like to be able to see the color scale key with out also having to open the full control panel.

Every new view should get a URL. That makes every view linkable. People who do not do this are actually violating the spirit of the HTML/URL specs. The fact that you see your browser history as polluted is an implementation detail that could be rectified by simply collapsing all consecutive URL's from the same domain over N url's into a hierarchical dropdown.

It can also be (sort of) rectified through judicious use of history.pushState vs. replaceState. The latter just replaces the URL in your URL bar but doesn't add an entry to your history - so every new view can get a new URL without polluting history.

I say "sort of" because everyone has their own idea about which things should be pushed vs. replaced. One person's "history pollution" is another's useful tool. But in this case it seems pretty clear that simply moving the map shouldn't push to history.

Re: A global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

#38

Post by joeyspn »

jenhsun wrote: post #2

Thanks, but I prefer this https://www.windyty.com/

Thanks for sharing this. This is so cool for kitesurfing and sailing. I didn't know any of these services and windyty looks really nice. Specially I like that you can zoom-in much more than in OP's globe....
Post reply on HN