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Weather Planning in Avare
Make Avare the place to go if you want to get weather and/or do planning for a flight.
Today, Avare has some basic weather functionality that you can take advantage of, but most of it is targeted at flight-time (on-map metars/TAFs/airmets/etc) or is simply a pass-through to other providers (wxbrief).
This project aims to add flight planning capabilities into Avare such that any pilot that is thinking about going for a flight can get all the information they need from Avare with intuitive UIs and controls.
- As a pilot, I want to quickly get a view of the current and near-term forecast for my area and areas around me.
- As a pilot, I want to plan a flight ahead of time and get weather updates as things change.
- As a pilot, I want to be provided options for a given flight plan when I have a flexible flight time/plan (i.e. help me decide whether to depart Fri night or Sat morning, help me decide where to go/which route to take)
Right now, Avare provides "plan" weather in two places:
- Plan View with the Get Weather button - gets weather from aviationweather.gov, generates HTML, and uses an Intent to open the HTML in a browser on the device
- WXB view with the Get Email Briefing button - sends the flight plan request to 800-wx-brief and requests information in email to be sent
Neither of the above really provide a solution for this inside the app natively. Instead they defer to other providers and UIs for this information. The Plan View at least opens weather locally, but in a browser app instead of Avare and the UI leaves much to be desired - especially in terms of chart browsing/navigation. The color-coded METARs and TAFs are ok, but are just plain text on an HTML page and the NAM forecast is totally unformatted.
Compare this with other tools used for flight planning. For example, LMFS (800wxbrief) provides a step-by-step interactive tool to walk you through all elements of the briefing with graphics. aviationweather.gov has a bunch of very informative graphics and other tools that provide both a big picture view and whatever details you're looking for.
Now, one question would be - why not just use those tools instead of building something into the app? That's a fair question, but many of these sites are difficult to use on mobile devices. Some interactions are with small buttons and checkboxes that don't translate well to smaller touch-focused devices. I personally would love to have a go-to app for seeing current weather information that I can easily navigate. Eventually, I could "star" certain graphics or even setup notifications to let me know when certain information has been updated.
Another related observation, but also a bigger topic, is the notion of how Avare does briefing/planning. We currently have a Plan button where you can put in your flight plan, save plans, etc. And then a WXB page where users actually create "real" flight plans and can submit/view them. To me, these pages should be merged - a plan is a plan. Where I get the information and what I do with it I should be able to do from one place. Seems to me we should have:
- Plan view - manage flight plans
- Brief view - get/store/view "official briefings"
- WX view - view/navigate weather information
Brief and WX might have some overlap, but the difference would be that the Brief view represents your official flight briefings while WX view provides a view of internet (and/or ADSB) weather content.
Since there could be quite a lot involved in implementing such functionality, it is important to break it down into consumable, deliverable phases. This is a proposal: 1 - Provide aviationweather.gov graphics using a native android view for interactions. Users should be able to select from different graphics and navigate options easily using touch controls. 2 - TBD
See here for a very early screenshot of what Step 1 might look like. All of the graphic categories along the top that you can scroll through, select, and then navigate the details (such a FL, time, etc) (not shown). http://imgur.com/ihpS5V4