Yet another weather app

[kerryhatcher]

I've been known to chase a tornado or fight a hurricane or two. The tools that either the NWS provides or are available on the market all have some drawback that eats at me. So after several rounds/attempts using python then on to rust (and several rust GUI frameworks) I stumbled onto Ply and things are finally falling into place. I'll circle back around when I get some real use out of it but I wanted to say thank you for an awesome framework!! There will be some very thankful EMA folks as well once I get this deployed.

EMA = Emergency Management Agency

[TheRedDeveloper]

It looks like you used the Custom Rendering functionality. Do you want to talk more on how you did it? Will the code be available anywhere?

[kerryhatcher]

So 2 things, 1 I'm really not all that great with rust, I use python primarily at work. 2, this was mostly AI coded. I've been toying around with some ideas for rust based tools at work so I gave Claude a try at building this as a functional experiment that has now turned into something that I'm actually going to share with the EMA community (I'm a LNO between the state of GA and the local EMA as part of my guard job, not my day job).

That all said, yes. I fully intend it to be an open source and freely available tool. Money shouldn't be a barrier when it comes to folks on the ground having the best tools in a disaster situation. There are plenty of local EMA's and volunteer fire departments with little to no budget, not to mention all the volunteer weather spotters and amateur radio operators. The two primary use cases I see this for is to put up on the big Operations Center screens or running on a mounted laptop when chasing. I prefer to use Linux on my chasing laptop because it doesn't get much use and I don't have to worry about M$ breaking something randomly in the last few months since I last used it. There's only one serious option for professional grade radar tooling that only works via wine and has some random issues when running under wine.

I've not settled on a proper project name, so I just went with rustywx as a placeholder: https://github.com/kerryhatcher/rustywx

When I consider it reliable enough for my own use in the field I'll cut a 1.0.0 release. Until then, YMMV: cargo install rustywx

The biggest hangup I've had so far since switching to ply has been graphs. It was only a minor issue but one of the few things claude couldn't just figure out on its own. May be an opportunity for some better docs or some helper functions.

[kerryhatcher]

Here's a side by side with the pro software I was referring to. Its a hot mess: