Android – Ben Follis

FlightWatch 1.2 adds in FlightWatchLite 1.3.5’s Local Weather feature with a few enhancements:

1. Stations appearing in Local Weather may be added to your main screen by pressing and holding on their entries.
2. Local Weather will auto update at an interval you specify. If you have moved from the previous location, the results will be relative to your new location. Updates will continue until you back out of the Local Weather window. E.G. you can lock your phone and it will still update. The price for this is, of course, higher battery usage.

In addition in 1.2, the Add Near Me feature has been upgraded to provide distance and bearing to the station.

As always, if there’s a feature you would like, please drop me a line at android@follis.net.

FlightWatchLite 1.3.5 fixes crashes exposed by the data pipeline rework. Versions prior to 1.2 neatly sidestepped some processing bugs when there were no METARS recieved from ADDS. FlightWatchLite also adds the new Local Weather feature, which will enable you to quickly see what’s going on within 100 statute miles.

Now for a rant. I really really hate androids database layers. Yes, android is running on a “low power” device (I don’t particularly consider any arm cpu used in android low powered). No, that doesn’t mean we need to go back to 1995 in terms of how we interact with databases. String munging, referencing columns by integer id instead of name, etc is for the birds.

You may have noticed that there is no FlightWatchLite 1.3 – 1.3.4 available. This was mostly caused by my own incompetence, i.e., my unfamiliarity with SQLiteHelper. Those versions would not correctly update FlightWatchLite’s DB to include the necessary data for the feature.  A framework for DB with migrations and fixtures would be greatly appreciated.

Significant effort has been put into unifying the data processing pipelines of the free and paid versions of FlightWatch, enabling faster development with fewer bugs. As part of the new pipline upgrades, FlightWatch gains the ability to discover Stations within 100 miles of of your current location. Both FlightWatch and FlightWatchLite can now send metar information using any messaging system you have installed that allows generic messages to be sent through it. This functionality can be accessed via the per-metar menu. Press and hold on a metar to activate the per-metar menu.

Now, on to more philosophical matters.

As a newly minted private pilot I am adding those features to FlightWatch that I actually want to use. That being said, my experiences flying around the San Francisco Bay Area are hardly representative of the aviation community as a whole, and I want FlightWatch to be generically useful. The above was a long-winded way of saying: If you want something in FlightWatch please tell me. I can’t guarantee that it’ll make it in, or that it’ll make it in fast, but I will read the email.

On the development roadmap for FlightWatch:

1. Local Weather: a combination of nearby station discovery and automated data fetching, this will allow you to quickly tell what weather’s going on in your area.
2. Mobile-Local weather. Local weather as you move, continually updated.
3. Trend graphs. I was visiting 14Y and the AWOS terminal there presented nifty 24h graphs on cloud heights, visibility and wind speeds/directions. There’s no reason we can’t have that on android.
4. Non-US weather sources. If any non-US pilots know of good, reliable data sources I’d be glad to incorporate them.