New all-inclusive storm tracking software coming in Fall - taking suggestions.

paulmarv

EF0
Joined
Mar 2, 2009
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31
Hello all,

For the past eight months, I have been working on software that combines all the functionality of WeatherDefender (and more) with the speed and power of GRLevelX. :)

What I ask you here today is:
What features would you like to see, and how should it differ from existing programs?

I plan on pricing similar to GR- certainly no outrageously expensive 'subscriptions' like WD. I want users to pay a flat fee around $70-$100 dollars so it's a much better value than WD and GR and is good enough for GR users.

I don't have a release date down yet, but it will be before 2010. Probably sometime in September.

That is all. By the way, right now it's looking great! Just put in data smoothing today. (I say 'data smoothing' instead of 'radar smoothing' because my system lets you smooth virtually any layer - raster or vector - provided with the proper palettes)

Just looking for some feedback/suggestions.
~Paul
 
I agree, a screenshot would be nice.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

Don't focus on making it look pretty. That was the downfall to Weather Defender, it was so graphic intense that it rendered it useless. I uninstalled it within 10 minutes as many others on here did.

Also keep in mind the pricing of your software. GRLevel3 is the most popular of all radar programs out there and it is an amazing program, and it is a one time fee of $80. If you plan to sell it at an expensive price or tack on some ridiculous monthly charge, chances are it won't sell.

There was nothing in Weather Defender that I couldn't 't do with GRLevel3, so I'm not really sure what functionality of Weather Defender you combined with GRLevel3 to make your program.

In all honesty, I can't think of anything that I want that I can't already do in GRLevel3 or StormLab, both are powerful radar software that does exactly what I need. It's going to take a lot to top those two.
 
Joey Ketcham said:
There was nothing in Weather Defender that I couldn't 't do with GRLevel3, so I'm not really sure what functionality of Weather Defender you combined with GRLevel3 to make your program.
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Things like satellite (special filters to make them transparent and TV-graphics-looking; color-enhancement also comes in handy with Water Vapor), SPC Aviation watches (the nice polygon ones - WD only does county based watches I think), county-based advisories, storm reports, convective outlooks (archived and real time), storm attributes and paths, mesoscale discussions, buoy reports and history observations, METAR plots and current observations, hurricane warnings/watches, projected paths, and wind fields, graphical forecasts from NDFD (again no WD support), water temp, iceberg discussions and plots, surface analyses, fire outlooks, live river flood monitoring, etc. I'm also going to try to get in GR2AE radar volumization, but depending on how pressed I am for time that may or may not happen.

I'm sure there are ways to view the aforementioned products in GR, it is just that I am not aware of them and the goal of this program is to take in everything and simplify the process of putting it on an interactive map.

As for screenshots, here is an old one from March, but I haven't really been taking many recently. I figured I'd put it up for proof anyways, even though it's looking a little different and a lot better nowadays.
 
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MAPS MAPS MAPS GPS GPS GPS

Gr3 is great and everything it has your new program should also have. I would make it GPS friendly and also have extensive maps. Similiar to gr3 shapefiles but your program should have all these roads in the program. A large task im sure but how awesome would it be? Also for instance your targeting a particular area of a storms. You should be able to pull up your cursor point to where your GPS signal is at then point to another llocation say the hook echo of a storm & the software shows you the fastest route taking every viable road as an option....paved or not....or make a setting to turn off the unpaved roads as well. maybe even gives you warnings of hail sizes you may encounter on that route in case you want to try another route if hail is say 3 inches. Or your about to get cored y a large area of VIL.....point to your gps marker....point away from the bad area and poof.....an escape route.
Another idea would be to be able to have something in the program that logs the GPS position of each photo you took and puts a marker on the map. Then it also saves a radar image when you take a picture.....
Sounds crazy I know but would be AWESOME.
Im sure its aways off but being able to have the radar in 3d then show your gps and everything works woud be computer game like.....im sure we will have that say in 2030?
Btw if you could run the program with internet thats great but sometimes gr3 ont run if your on the road and have a bad signal. Maybe have something with a backup signal or alternate signal like what Baron WXWORX uses. One could use internet if they have a signal but when the net signal is lost it imediately picks up the Baron signal and will keep plugging right along.
Just some ideas id like to see
 
I love the idea for the photos layer. You could turn it on, click on the position of the photo on the map and bring up all the statistics for that time. Awesome idea.

Anyways, I thought I should take a more recent screenshot. I'll probably wind up changing the radar palette- It's too green. I've been watching The Weather Channel too much :)

Oh, and yes, it's a map of entire North America. That's always been one pesky thing about GR for me - that you can only see one region at a time.
 
John Wetter said:
Combine all of those, only write it for the mac... :-)
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A-Freakin'-Men! Please! I can't stand running boot camp on my mac to chase. Overall, though I really like the screen shots you have. It looks really smooth. My biggest thing would be just to make sure updating each scan isn't data heavy to do. I really like the idea someone mentioned about marking the map when you take pictures. Also making it really easy to incorporate GPS, Spotternetwork, etc would be great. But yeah, mostly making it Mac compatible as well would be stellar!
 
Are you writing to use either level 2 and level 3 data? It be nice to have a on the fly tick box to choose a source. I don't know if it's possible but multiple feeds to display more than one radar station at a time would be great.

Also if you talking all inclusive, having it update a website/blog would be cool too.
 
D. Hayes said:
Are you writing to use either level 2 and level 3 data? It be nice to have a on the fly tick box to choose a source. I don't know if it's possible but multiple feeds to display more than one radar station at a time would be great.

Also if you talking all inclusive, having it update a website/blog would be cool too.
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I would like to second that notion! I very much like to see an option for a "mode" where data from multiple radar sites are viewable at the same time on one screen. (Barons seems to be able to do this quite well with Sat based Mobile Threat Net although the resolution is terrible.) I find having to jump from window to window in GRL3 very annoying. Also, accessing the super resolution data is a must such as how it is done in Stormlab. Again, the whole thing with having to use multiple programs like GRL3, GRL2, etc to see different products is HIGHLY annoying. If you could address these 2 issues..I would definately consider buying it and dumping GRL3!

Another nice addition..as to add some free lightning data which is now available here: http://www.strikestarus.com/ .

Thanks and hope you can pull a rabbit out of the hat with your new program and raise the bar for all radar software programs!
 
I agree. If you combined level 2 and level 3 products into one application, and priced it at or less than GrLevel3 you would blow GrLevel3 out of the water (or at least until Mike Gibson catches up with you).

Im sure its aways off but being able to have the radar in 3d then show your gps and everything works woud be computer game like.....im sure we will have that say in 2030?
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The technology and consumer hardware exists to do that today. Its just a matter of someone sitting down and writing it.

Here's a few other features I can suggest to give you a competitive edge:

A more comprehensive warnings window. Show the users distance to the tornado/severe thunderstorm. Put all of the warning information in sortable columns.

On mouse move over the radar window display the distance from the map point the mouse is over to the user's GPS.

Log the radar data and the user's GPS data. Allow them to export it to a webpage to make their chase logs a one click process.

Allow for long radar loops (greater than 20 frames).

I could suggest you add a full mapping application like Street Atlas or Streets and Trips, but that's really not a one man job. A team of people would have to sit down and write that one. This really is needed before a chaser application is labeled "all-inclusive", however.

As for Mac users... I believe a software application should be written for one platform, and written well. I've seen my fair share of cross platform applications that run like crap on every platform. Optimize it for one platform. Use the platform with the best graphics hardware support (Windows).
 
Skip Talbot said:
As for Mac users... I believe a software application should be written for one platform, and written well. I've seen my fair share of cross platform applications that run like crap on every platform. Optimize it for one platform. Use the platform with the best graphics hardware support (Windows).
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As usual, a comment like this warrants a response... :)

I think that you'll find that Macs, at least nowadays, use 90% of standard PC parts.. Including video cards and such. That's why it's possible to run Windows on a Mac without any effort. By using the proper compiler, you can write for both Mac OS and Windows and have minimal changes to cater to each. The days of completely re-writing from scratch are over because Apple has standardized on the Intel processor.

I'd love to avoid all of the inherent Windows issues and complication.. Plus viruses, security holes (i.e., Active X, etc...) Most of the negative things about Macintosh have been repeated for years without anyone really knowing the truth and just regurgitating "old wife's tales".

In regards to this proposed new software, I'd love to see a 3-D image much like Google Earth where you can see a ground plain view from your standpoint and the storms hanging in front of you. Now that would be cool!
 
I have just one idea really...everyone else has pretty good ones. I myself do not have a GPS but plan on getting a cell phone that I can tether to my laptop. I know recently a fellow ST member has been creating shape files of more detailed road network for GR but if these were already in the program and the user was able to turn on/off different road types(interstate, US hwy, 2lane, 4 lane, residential) i would consider that very valuable. o and i wold love to a tester for this program ;)
 
Wonderful ideas guys- I can't believe I didn't think of some. Unfortunately, this will be Windows only since I simply do not have the resources to create Mac software.
Mike Kovalchick said:
I would like to second that notion! I very much like to see an option for a "mode" where data from multiple radar sites are viewable at the same time on one screen. (Barons seems to be able to do this quite well with Sat based Mobile Threat Net although the resolution is terrible.) I find having to jump from window to window in GRL3 very annoying. Also, accessing the super resolution data is a must such as how it is done in Stormlab. Again, the whole thing with having to use multiple programs like GRL3, GRL2, etc to see different products is HIGHLY annoying. If you could address these 2 issues..I would definately consider buying it and dumping GRL3!

Another nice addition..as to add some free lightning data which is now available here: http://www.strikestarus.com/ .

Thanks and hope you can pull a rabbit out of the hat with your new program and raise the bar for all radar software programs!
Click to expand...

The current version DOES let you to that. Proof. However, it does not read Level-III or Level-II data yet, it merely gets the raster images from here. And forgive the absence of smoothing, I just got that working yesterday and haven't applied it to all raster layers.

Eventually, I will add Level-II ingestion as it is necessary for the 3D radar/radar slice.
 
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