nav can awws site closure

[runway29]

You guys might want to checkout one of my passion projects: notam.ca and wxbrief.ca
Both sites are using the CFPS data but try to present them in a much more user friendly way (including making them accessible on mobile devices). Some of in my opinion coolest features:

• Fully mobile friendly
• GFAs have again tooltips (that even work on mobile) for all airports
• GFAs have an approximated route drawn onto them
• Upper Winds are again in a table (and have an easy interpolation tool)
• NOTAM can be visualized on a map (no more guessing where things are)
• Most search params are in the URL so you can share that with friends and/or your mobile device without having to re-enter the search

Let me know if anyone has any ideas for improvements/additions to it.

Obviously the obligatory legal disclaimer: Do not trust any of the things you see and I highly recommend you get a weather briefing from a FIC and/or fact check against the official CFPS website.

That is very very much appreciated! I can't stand using CFPS

[Onesie]

Nice interface at first glance but functionality of getting the metar/TAF for a series of airports is poop. Like digits said, it would be nice if the TAF for said airport was right below its metar. Helps for a quicker bigger picture of the weather around the airport for the day. It seems if you add a bunch of airports, it displays them in an alphabetic order and not the order you input'd them in the search bar. It is nice to be able to input a series of airports along your direction of flight and quickly scroll and see metar/TAFs and not have to be jumping around on the webpage. A quick big picture. As for entering multiple airports... you can't? If you leave a space between 2 airports ("CYVR CYXX") you can't make a search without an error. You need to type CYVR. Press search button. Type CYXX. Press search button. Etc. Awws old site (rip) had a search field where you can click and get the option to auto-fill all your airports. This new website has a restore default button. Lol. Aka clear. How about save my previous airports button! This new site misses the mark. It's like the developers of this site never heard of a focus group for feedback. This website went backwards

[fkrauthan]

Nice interface at first glance but functionality of getting the metar/TAF for a series of airports is poop. Like digits said, it would be nice if the TAF for said airport was right below its metar. Helps for a quicker bigger picture of the weather around the airport for the day. It seems if you add a bunch of airports, it displays them in an alphabetic order and not the order you input'd them in the search bar. It is nice to be able to input a series of airports along your direction of flight and quickly scroll and see metar/TAFs and not have to be jumping around on the webpage. A quick big picture. As for entering multiple airports... you can't? If you leave a space between 2 airports ("CYVR CYXX") you can't make a search without an error. You need to type CYVR. Press search button. Type CYXX. Press search button. Etc. Awws old site (rip) had a search field where you can click and get the option to auto-fill all your airports. This new website has a restore default button. Lol. Aka clear. How about save my previous airports button! This new site misses the mark. It's like the developers of this site never heard of a focus group for feedback. This website went backwards

In regards of entering multiple airports you don't have to press search in between. If you use the mode with dropdown you just select the airport and then you should be able to type again to select the next airport. If you switched to text mode you can just enter both airports (ether separated by space or comma). There is a small delay between entering an airport and the search button becoming active again as in the background it has to resolve that checkpoint.

In regards of order: I can not really reproduce that. The METAR locations are sorted based on order entered. The sort is actually defined by the CFPS APIs (so you should see the exact same sorting behaviour).

The main reason why right now METAR and TAFs are separate are two fold:

• They are two separate select-able weather products (obviously I could still combine it internally)
• I show the current category plotted on a map. So I would have to make some decisions in how to show that if results are combined (e.g. only show METAR status)

But if you have a great idea how it could be re-presented I am open to maybe at least give a user option to toggle between both modes.

[JasonE]

New site is terrible. No more simple text weather with a pre saved URL. Everyone needs to write NavCanada.

[Conflicting Traffic]

New site is terrible. No more simple text weather with a pre saved URL. Everyone needs to write NavCanada.

Quick reminder of the address:

There still time to complain service@navcan.ca.

[Fly0nTheWall]

Ok, unpopular opinion, I know I know. But it seems like they've made the interface on mobile a lot better now and more user friendly. I do agree the simplicity of the Metar/taf on the old site was a huuuge plus, and I wish we still had that. But the interface now in my opinion isn't half bad and it's nice to have quicker access to all the wx products in one spot on a mobile device instead of having to flip between a bunch of windows/pages. Ok, y'all can shoot me now xD

[CpnCrunch]

Ok, unpopular opinion, I know I know. But it seems like they've made the interface on mobile a lot better now and more user friendly. I do agree the simplicity of the Metar/taf on the old site was a huuuge plus, and I wish we still had that. But the interface now in my opinion isn't half bad and it's nice to have quicker access to all the wx products in one spot on a mobile device instead of having to flip between a bunch of windows/pages. Ok, y'all can shoot me now xD

Its completely unusable on ipad. Put your finger on the gfa to scroll it, and it wont scroll. They havent improved it at all and its simply impossible to actually see the gfa. God knows what its like on a phone.

[CaptDukeNukem]

I feel like my father 30 years ago when I tried showing him how windows 95 works.

I’m glad you guys know what you’re doing, cuz this all sounds awesome, but someone gotta show me where to find my passwords first

[CpnCrunch]

Just tried it on a phone and as predicted it is even more unusable than ipad. Still i,possible to scroll when viewing gfas but due to smaller screen much more difficult to find a non img to drag. Such basic incompetence, even for navcan. Im actually astounded that they havent bothered spending the 5 mins it would take to make the friggin img scrollable, and that the site is so terrible on mobile. Are we meant to bring a friggin laptop with us?

[JasonE]

I don't think the developers even tried on a mobile device, likely only larger tablets. The output is too tiny and unreadable. You have to scroll around on a normal sized phone making it very difficult to use.

A simple plain text output like before is all I want. I had a url saved with all the local airports that would give simple text output in a split second.

[SE7EN]

I don't think the developers even tried on a mobile device, likely only larger tablets. The output is too tiny and unreadable. You have to scroll around on a normal sized phone making it very difficult to use.

A simple plain text output like before is all I want. I had a url saved with all the local airports that would give simple text output in a split second.

My thoughts exactly. Seems like they only got feedback from Nav employees when designing it. Probably a good system for FSS Wx Briefers, not great for pilots. It takes me twice as long to get Wx on my phone with the new layout & font.

[fkrauthan]

I don't think the developers even tried on a mobile device, likely only larger tablets. The output is too tiny and unreadable. You have to scroll around on a normal sized phone making it very difficult to use.

A simple plain text output like before is all I want. I had a url saved with all the local airports that would give simple text output in a split second.

My thoughts exactly. Seems like they only got feedback from Nav employees when designing it. Probably a good system for FSS Wx Briefers, not great for pilots. It takes me twice as long to get Wx on my phone with the new layout & font.

From what I've heard not even FSS and Nav employees are fully happy with the system.

[Fly0nTheWall]

Ok, unpopular opinion, I know I know. But it seems like they've made the interface on mobile a lot better now and more user friendly. I do agree the simplicity of the Metar/taf on the old site was a huuuge plus, and I wish we still had that. But the interface now in my opinion isn't half bad and it's nice to have quicker access to all the wx products in one spot on a mobile device instead of having to flip between a bunch of windows/pages. Ok, y'all can shoot me now xD

Its completely unusable on ipad. Put your finger on the gfa to scroll it, and it wont scroll. They havent improved it at all and its simply impossible to actually see the gfa. God knows what its like on a phone.

Ohh ya, just tried it on my iPad for the first time. That is pretty bad. Funny enough it works way better on my Google Pixel.

[CpnCrunch]

Ohh ya, just tried it on my iPad for the first time. That is pretty bad. Funny enough it works way better on my Google Pixel.

Terrible on google pixel 8 phone. Tiny, can't scroll by dragging the gfa images.

Would be so easy to create a more usable user interface. Looks like they really over-engineered the thing using a complex architecture, for what is really a pretty simple application.

[tsgarp]

Not all change is improvement.

[CpnCrunch]

Looking at it further, it looks like on phones there is a slight advantage in that you don't have the left-hand pseudo-frame with the airports and tickboxes that you see on the ipad (and desktop), which takes up a lot of the space on the ipad. It just displays that above the results, so you don't lose half the width. However, it's still a very poor experience trying to view the GFA on the phone...you can't drag anywhere in the GFA. You can use two fingers to zoom into the GFA itself, but then the majority of the GFA image is half greyed out.

[Big Pistons Forever]

I never used CFPS and now that AWWS is gone I use the aero weather app and DINS for notams.

[CpnCrunch]

I never used CFPS and now that AWWS is gone I use the aero weather app and DINS for notams.

FltPlan Go can be used for METARs, TAFs and airport NOTAMs, and Foreflight additionally has FIR NOTAMS if you want to pay (which I don't any more).

I tried DINS for FIR NOTAMS, but it doesn't seem to be all that great. When I enter CZVR I get hundreds of NOTAMS, so it seems even worse than Nav Canada's abortion if that's possible.

None of those give GFAs, so we're stuck with the abysmal mobile interface.

[MyWave]

Just press the "Any" key.

[7ECA]

My god this new site is utterly shit... sure we used to complain about AWWS being an abortion from the dark ages of dial up internet and faxes, but it was more functional and better laid out than this thing.

[CpnCrunch]

I was just looking for a better solution and came across wxbrief.ca and notam.ca (which I see were also mentioned previously in this thread). Both work great, and show the info from CFPS and they work really well on mobile.

Also, for weather, avalanche.ca is good at showing an overview of weather up to a week ahead in terms of rain/storms, and windy.com is great for estimating winds.

notam.ca also shows graphical representation of notams. It's not quite as slick as Foreflight...CYA124(M) is showing as a big circle rather than the actual dimensions. I think Foreflight must have their own database for each advisory area, as the NOTAM itself just gives co-ords for the centre and radius. But I'm too cheap to pay for Foreflight any more, so I can live with it.

[Red_Comet]

Downside of Flt Plan Go is that it doesn't fetch the latest METAR/TAFs immediately upon update. Can take a few minutes which I find annoying. I've been using Windy and it's incredible, even has plain language mode for all METAR/TAF/NOTAMs. Can't recommend it enough.

[goingnowherefast]

Is there a good way to view the GFAs? I can't deal with the new site on mobile devices.

[CpnCrunch]

Is there a good way to view the GFAs? I can't deal with the new site on mobile devices.

Wxbrief.ca

[oldncold]

To all that complained to service@navcanada.ca and continue to do so. A tip of the hat. TransportCanada has a seat on the board of navcanada and worth a try. The new site reminds me of a hiway painting crew that had a few many beers. The lines got put down and folks got there. But it was a mess