Friday, January 11, 2019

Saildrone Forecast

Is there anything cooler than shipping an app you've spent a year and a half working on?
It was a rhetorical question.  There is not.


Saildrone Forecast

Hint: It's a weather app.

Saildrone Forecast


Yup, Saildrone Forecast is a weather app.  Just watch the video.


Go download it.  I'll wait.

Technical Bits


There's a ton of stuff in Saildrone Forecast that's unique.  But there are a couple bits of interest in WhirlyGlobe-Maply itself, like the new sampler/loader architecture and offscreen render targets.  Go watch the video.



Could you make your own weather app out of the box now?  Ha ha.  Oh god no.  There's so much other stuff to do.  Not to mention the data.  But there are cool things to do with the vector maps and render targets.

Acknowledgements


I didn't do this all alone.  Heck, I didn't even write the whole app. 

Credit goes to Logical Animal for the rest of the UI.  Big thanks to the meteorology/modeling team at Saildrone for the data and putting up with stupid questions.  Thanks to the platform developers and ops for processing data and keeping it running.  And, of course, management and finance upon whom I can bestow the greatest contracting honor:  They always pay early.