Hey all. If you regularly use this app you may have noticed that weather and controller information are currently unavailable.
This is the unfortunate result of relying on multiple services to bring in the data that the app gathers and presents.
As far as the weather is concerned, the issue is that the service vendor has updated the format in which they send this data. While this format is of much better standard, since the app relied on the old way to translate it, it wasn’t able to show the new contents.
That said - the fix is being worked on as we speak. Due to lack of free time I’m not gonna post an ETA, but METAR information is back online on my end. It brings also some minor improvements to how weather works, - for example, the weather cell on the main page will show how long ago the observation was made, rather than a generic Zulu-based time stamp of when this observation was made.
Forecasts (TAF) and Controller issues are still to be ironed out, and are the next items on the list.
Long story short, the app will be back with an update as soon as possible, and in the mean time thank you for your patience and thanks to those who reported issues. The value of reports and getting in touch with me directly about any issues cannot be understated.
NOTE - UPDATE ISN’T OUT YET, THIS IS A PROGRESS UPDATE FROM MY END ONLY :)
Just about everything I wanted to do for this release is done.
Fixes:
All the weather stuff will be back to normal
ATC in dashboard (that little horizontal grid of controllers down the bottom) had a bit of a reliability boost (I noticed some issues with loading empty states on subsequent searches)
Ton of under-the-hood rewrites that won’t make much difference (though hopefully I’ve taken out some performance bottlenecks), but importantly it improved the overall health of the codebase and will make future maintenance and improvements easier to do - which translates to it taking less time. Yay!.
New stuff (assuming Apple doesn’t reject some of it)
Reference Diagrams (accessible via Information tab). Basically some of the common, free-use diagrams like circuits (patterns), airspace classes and IFR cruise flight levels. They’re arranged as a vertical list of cards, which isn’t optimal, but you can filter them (pull down on that screen to show the search bar and start typing)
“Today” extension (swipe left from the home screen like you would to access your normal widgets on iOS, or use force-touch on the app icon) - this will show you the current active ATC on the expert server
Weather section on the dashboard will now show time elapsed since observation was made, with additional colour tagging to highlight how out of date the info might be
You can now mail support (that’s me) directly from the app - accessible via the information tab. You can still reach me on here or on Facebook, but who has time for extra clicks?
That’s all for now, folks, I’ll post a new thread when release is out. Thanks for reading and support
