Build 20: Home, Stations and the charts rebuilt

Build 20 is for iPhone and iPad. Mac testers stay on build 19. Most of the app was rebuilt for it, and it’s the build the public beta for meteorologists starts from. That post covers what Sondex does now and what’s still wrong.

Home

• Rebuilt around the stations you monitor. A status word and a one-line briefing sit over the SPC categorical outlook, which now has Day 2 as well as Day 1.
• Each monitored station gets a 48-hour storm-chance ribbon for every model it follows. Open the Skew-T jumps to Charts at that hour.
• Monitoring can end on a date, and each station keeps its own models and retention.
• The + menu adds a station from the catalog, with Nearby and a Monitor button on every row, or a file, or a link.

Stations

• The Stations tab leads with the map, under a list of your stations, nearby stations or all of them, with NWS, ASOS and Custom filters. On iPad it’s a list, a map and an inspector, and you can monitor several stations at once.
• A station’s screen shows a small Skew-T and hodograph, its readouts, the forecast read, and its downloaded, available and historical runs, over a NEXRAD map.
• Station IDs match the BUFKIT headers (KOMA, not OMA). Stations you already have are renamed in place.
• The Phoenix (PSR), Medford (MAX) and Middleton Island (AIH) NWS rows are out of the catalog: IEM’s BUFKIT IDs for them belong to sites in Wyoming, Alabama and Nebraska. The catalog is now 1,078 stations.

Charts

• All twelve charts share one scrubber with a storm-potential strip, one Layers form, and a readout strip that opens the indices sheet. Chart options persist.
• Skew-T. A wet-bulb trace, a choice of surface, mixed-layer or most-unstable parcel, and callouts for the LCL, LFC, EL, 0 °C and −20 °C.
• Hodograph. Layer bands, the 0–6 km shear vector and a critical-angle arc.
• Stability Indices is now Indices Through Time.
• Chart themes are down to three: Standard, plus Print and Monochrome in the Supporter Pack.

Import

• Open in Sondex works on iPhone and iPad, for .buf and .buz.
• Drop files anywhere in the window, paste a link, or pick a .buz in Files.
• Every import ends on a review sheet: what was added, what was replaced, and what failed and why.
• On iPad with a keyboard: ⌘1 to ⌘4 switch tabs, ⌘O opens a file, ⌘F searches, ⌘R fetches, and ⌘[ and ⌘] step through soundings.

Forecast read

• It’s graded as a storm chance and a potential, and it now uses the model’s own QPF from the BUFKIT surface block, which Sondex parses as of this build.
• Prose from Apple’s on-device model that contradicts the graded chance is thrown out in favor of the template text.
• The debug badge, error note and engine footnote are gone.

Fixed

• Wind speeds. Barbs, the hodograph and time-height winds were 1.94 times too fast in build 19: winds already in knots were multiplied by the m/s-to-knots factor.
• 0–6 km shear. The parser filed the BUFKIT header’s BRCH, the bulk Richardson number, as 0–6 km shear, which zeroed every shear readout and the CAPE–shear chart. Shear is now computed from the wind profile, for runs imported earlier too.
• Two auto-fetch parses running at once could save one file’s soundings under another.
• Overlapping auto-fetches no longer drop each other’s downloads, and an error page from the server is no longer saved as a run.
• Truncated or malformed BUFKIT files show an error instead of crashing the app.
• Deleting a run deletes its file, and importing a file you already have no longer deletes it.
• Background refresh works after a cold launch, and the notification prompt appears once instead of twice.
• Sharing some charts on iPhone no longer crashes.

Layouts

• On iPad and iPhone Duo, panes follow the fold: chart and inspector split at the hinge. On the Duo’s outer display, the chart menu, layers and a vertical scrubber move into the side bar.