Great! I actually haven’t touched the Crestline camera, so it’s possible something else is at play there (connection speed, computer, etc).

I had left off the temperatures from the graphs, since as I recall, only one of the weather stations was actually reporting temp data. Once CRS and AJX get updated to start sending their data again, I’ll take another look to see what we can get as far as temp goes.

For forecast temps, you can also click on the “View Details” link below the NOAA NWS forecast graphs on the right (underneath the windgrams). That will show you the full graph of all forecast data (temp, wind, etc).

Ok – baby steps:

• Main forum view has been updated – clicking on “Forums” anywhere on the site gets you to the main forum view, which now shows Topics sorted by last activity.
• Each topic in the list shows its title (clicking the title takes you to the topic itself), who started it (clicking the author name takes you to their profile), which forum it was posted in (clicking that takes you to the list of topics in that forum), and when the last post (reply) was (clicking that takes you directly to that last reply in the topic).
• On mobile sizes, this topic list is compressed a bit to accommodate the small screen – title (clicking that takes you to the topic itself), last post link is directly underneath (clicking that takes you to the last reply in that topic), and author.
• Paging buttons (previous / next) are at the bottom of the topic listing (if you’re super bored and just want to flip through all of the topics in chronological order of last activity).
• Removed “Active Topics” from the sidebar, as it was redundant with the main listing (that also means less scrolling on mobile sizes if you want to get directly to the recent replies or list of all forums).

There are a few cleanup items to do to turn off the threaded replies – that’s on the way.

Ok – Twister variation with less colors is now up. Let’s try it out for a while and see how it goes. Also, this is another version of that with black direction marker (instead of the whole marker being the direction color). Chime in if you think one is easier to read than the other.

I sense a new variation on the fly-in bomb drops…

I hear you – just haven’t gotten to that yet.

I completely agree with you. Full-disclosure: I am one of those people (deuteranopia, which is a red/green deficiency).  For me, I find the new ones a lot easier to see the differences in the different directions, but obviously I can’t speak for everyone. In my opinion, I think the old graphs/compasses had too many “steps” in color (almost a full gradient all the way around) and I had to really stare at it to figure out what direction it was telling me.

Perhaps a run-through of the process for creating the new ones might help to see where I was going with them (maybe boring, maybe interesting – you be the judge)? Here goes nothing:

My primary concern was changing the color/direction as little as possible (trying to keep the pitchforks at bay) – both the old and the new had NE/Red, SE/Yellow, SW/Green, NW/Blue (and gradients in between those). If it were just me using it, I actually wouldn’t even bother with the color (maybe red for everything that has a north component, green for our ideal directions, and yellow for iffy/cross) as I think it would be much easier to read, but I know we all like high resolution in our weather readings. Even better (at least, to me), would be to include direction arrows along the graph lines so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about what direction it’s saying (that’s an issue because there would be way too many arrows packed in along those lines – would be impossible to read).

I decided to reduce the full-blown color gradient all the way around the compass down to 16 colors (1 for each primary/secondary compass direction). I thought the harder “steps” between directions would give greater clarity in reading the graphs (easier to tell which direction, since the colors would each be a bit more “different”). Sticking with the same theme as the old graphs (NE/Red, SW/Green, etc), I picked a bright red, blue, green, and yellow for the main directions (NE, SE, SW, NW) and then ran those colors through a tool to generate a gradient between each (that produced 3 “steps” between each main directional color). Same exact colors are used in the compasses and in the graphs (so that we’re using a consistent “language” everywhere on the site).

So the questions I’ve had in my head (maybe the same ones you’re considering now):

Do we just need to futz around with the color selections and make adjustments there (basically just picking slightly different colors to bump up the saturation/contrast)?

Are we going about it wrong and should we change it a bit more (perhaps going down to 8 compass directions / 8 colors; switching the primary colors/directions to N/E/S/W, so N is Red, S is green, etc and then generating the “steps” between those instead; switching to holfuy‘s model of green for good flyable direction, yellow for “good enough” and nothing/red for not flyable; or, something else entirely – maybe red for all of the north directions, and then blue/green/yellow for everything that has a south component)?

Ken is working on getting into the Wx on Crestline and AJX – should be back anytime now (other post here).

We can work on the color palette for the compass, but I struggled with the old colors (found it super hard to read). I’m sure there are lots of differing opinions on this one, but we can try a few variations out to see which one works for the most people.