Radar Viewer Tour

Radar Viewer

When the RadarViewer starts, the zoom level is set to the most "zoomed out" level available for the radar image tiles.  The map is centered on the latitude, longitude of the most recently downloaded forecast.

The Radar Viewer Menu

The options below (and more) are easily selected from Radar Viewer menu.

Follow-Me

When the "Follow location..." menu item is selected HandWx will keep the map position updated with your current location and will download new radar images every five minutes.

Update Radar

You can select the "Update Radar..." menu item to update the radar images one time or have HandWx down load new images every five minutes (without the map location moving.  This allows you to monitor the radar for a location different from your current location.

Zoom

The zoom slider is available after a long press and it is set to the zoom limits of the available tiles.  You can also use the "Quick zoom…" menu to select "Continent", "State", "City" and "Street" level zoom.  If you looking for an interesting storm, use "Continent".  If you want to see an area about the size of a "typical" state, use "State" level.  If you want to know if a storm is approaching your community or a nearby town, use "City" and if you want to know if it has hit your house yet, choose "Street".

Animation

You can run a radar loop of three recent images by selecting the "Animation…" menu item.  This will give you an idea of the speed and direction of the storm track.  (The quality degrades in this animated GIF, but the animation display on the phone is the same clear crisp images of the static displays).

Click to see the radar loop.

Transparency

With "Street" level zoom it's easy to get a view that is totally obscured by radar echo.

To see what's going on, use the "Transparency" menu.  Here's what the "More transparency" choice looks like for this same radar image.

Image Updates

The radar images are cached in memory to help speed things up for small shifts in location, but the priority for updates is given to always making sure you are looking at the very latest images.  Every update checks with the server to see if new images are available and if new images are available they are downloaded and displayed, replacing the previous overlays.  You will always see a progress bar when new images are being downloaded, and you can cancel any download with the back button.

Google Map Layers

You can select which default Google Maps Layers you want to display.

Progress Bars

Every action HandWx takes that requires network access shows a progress bar while the action is taking place.  If you want to stop the download and go back to what you were just viewing, you can do so by selecting the "Back" button on your phone.