Category: Amazing Aurora Updates

The settings screen in the app got a makeover. Switches and sliders are gone. They felt clunky and, after some tester feedback (thanks, Chad!), the decision was made to kill the sliders for Kp and HPI alert values. Instead, subscribers can now toggle these up and down with arrows. It’s simpler, cleaner, and easier to adjust.

I’m putting the finishing touches up on this version! The goal is to have all the bugs, kinks, and design flaws worked out by Sunday so I can push to Google and Apple. This will allow time to tweak anything I may have missed, policy wise, before the end of the month. Who’s ready for aurora season?! I know I am!

I am feverishly working on several aspects of updating the app for the upcoming season. I am grateful for the feedback I have received from users through either email, Facebook messenger, text, or even through the app reviews on the stores. Those really give me direction to continue working on improving the experience (aurora and app) for everyone! If you are curious, here is a list of things I am working on to get the app updated by August 1st:

• Black loading/reloading screens to kill the white (kills night vision) reload pages
• Adding the hemispheric power input to an alert so users can get advanced notice when potential increases (subscriber feature)
• Cleaning up and adjusting notifications; uncovered some issues with keys and programming logic
• Cleaning up the server and moving old data to its own archived database

It’s been a pretty busy off-season working behind the scenes, but I am confident the changes will only make the app, user experience, and community much better! And, I wouldn’t be where I am without the help of a few patient souls. A special shout out to Chad, Rachel, and Sarah for being testers and providing feedback on this next iteration of Amazing Aurora!

Work has been ongoing with the version 7 update. It has taken quite a while to reconfigure a myriad of things within the app, but things are rolling along smoothly. All of the desired changes I have made appear to be working with initial tests. With some of the updates, I will need to update files on the server to accept new values from within the app. The good news is that I am still on track for a June/July release to the beta test team to put the app through its paces and make sure nothing was overlooked. We are less than 90 days away from the start of the 2022-2023 aurora season!

I made a few minor “under the hood” app tweaks on Sunday, March 13, 2022, based on feedback from a user. The 3-day Kp forecast was off by quite a bit due to the parser failing to appropriately correct for the G1 and G2 conditions SWPC put in their forecast. That was adjusted and all appears to be working well now. If you notice any discrepancies, please give me feedback so I can look into you. I have also added the time that the server last checked the SWPC forecast, so users can now see the currency of the data for the 3-day forecast in the app.

You might notice that the times (at least for Alaska) start at 1am instead of 12am. This is due to the daylight savings time change and its relation to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). This is expected, so don’t be alarmed by it. It lines up with the SWPC forecast where 09 UTC is 1am here in Alaska. If you are in other parts of the world and see issues, please let me know so I can investigate. However, it appears that all should be good!

A couple of tweaks were also made to the legend and the SWPC status indicators. I added an explanation for the N/A in the solar wind data. Basically, if data was not received that matches the 5, 15, 30, 45, or 60-minute windows, it will display N/A meaning there is no data to display. This happens from time to time but is most common when there is a SWPC outage and no data is received for a prolonged period of time. The status indicator for the solar wind was fixed, as it was stuck on red due to a minor miscalculation of values. It should be good to go now!

Those are the latest updates to the app! I am looking forward to working on the next iteration over the summer to bring some more refinements to the subscribe user settings; namely, the HPI notifications!