Grant_FLO

The latest IOS version (16.4) has introduced a display bug in the app which we are looking into. Please bear with us.

The blue outline around the boxes and the little clock symbol in the 'hour' box show the 'current hour' - if you line that up between the two forecasts you will see they are identical. This is because when center on midnight is used in order to show this mornings forecast it must also show the last 12 hours of yesterday. This often causes confusion so will likely change in the future to only show 'tonight' when centre on Midnight is used rather than try to display this mornings forecast.

As the old data provider has been having some more issues this morning we have decided to go live with the new data provider today - the beta site has been turned off but regular clear outside should now be running as usual but with the new data provider.

The Pulsar software is fully ASCOM compatible so it will keep the slot / shutter centred on where the scope is pointing automatically.

Ironically - the data provider the existing Clear Outside uses is down - this is the same data provider turning off completely next week 😞 The beta version is still working: https://beta.clearoutside.com/ Hopefully the live version will be fixed shortly.

Post code / location searching should still be working - you may need to give it a second when typing to give it chance to lookup the postcodes and give you a suggested list in a drop down. If that's not working for you, please PM me the post code you are trying to use and perhaps the browser / device you are using so I can take a look - thank you.

Check your address bar - each forecast location has a unique URL, if you have book marked the FLO HQ forecast location then even if you have set somewhere else to be your 'Default Location' it won't matter if you are going to a specific location URL. You would need to go to the home URL of https://beta.clearoutside.com/ for the default location part to work.

As some of you know, one of the data providers we use for Clear Outside is closing at the end of March following their purchase by Apple. As a result, we have found a new data provider which we think will give improved forecasts and also over time some additional data fields which we will be making use of. The main Clear Outside website will change over next week to this new provider but, if you would like to test and have a sneak peak you can try it out at: https://beta.clearoutside.com/ Functionally, it should be pretty much the same it's just the data provider we have changed. If you turn on the 'Experimental Features' using the button on the bottom right it will display some additional forecast fields - we now have three separate cloud forecasts from independent forecasts that can be seen including two that provide forecasts at different heights. Once we have moved over to the new data provider our next steps will be updating our mobile apps and adding in some much requested functionality like the ability to change the displayed unit of measure (fahrenheit is coming!). We also hope to provide a way for people to visualise multiple forecasts at once - if you are anything like me, I tend to look at multiple forecasts and if 2-3 of them concur it gives me a greater confidence in the forecast. Thanks, Grant

Sorry this was a setup error on our website for these new products - now fixed, thanks for pointing it out.

The forecasts look like they match to me You've got the view set to 'Center on Midnight' which when you view before midday means in order to show the morning it actually starts by showing the second half of yesterday. That means in your screenshot the forecast for tonight is actually the first chunk of the second 'Monday' row of data. I don't like the centre on midnight view for this reason and prefer the 'Start at current hour' view because it is much more intuitive to read - you might also want to install the app because this gives a much better experience on mobile devices than the cut down mobile version of the website. Hope that helps

I've had a couple of people mention this but I've not been able to replicate the issues myself. There doesn't seem to be a clear pattern and with many thousands of people using the Android app, it's a very tiny percentage that have reported issues so it doesn't seem to be a widespread thing. I'll do some testing and see if I can figure out why it might be slow in Marshmallow in particular.

Hi Mogster, Thank you for taking the time to leave some feedback You are the third person in the last couple of months to contact us about colour blindness - I have to hold my hands up here, it isn't something that crossed my mind when we build Clear Outside but, it is definitely something I will be looking at when I get an opportunity to work on the next update for it. My intention is to build a settings panel where people can use the unit of measures used (our most requested feature!) as well as choosing the colour scheme to use that way people with colourblindness can use a colour scheme that works better for them. The mismatch between rain and cloud cover could be how the data is provided to us - the cloud data doesn't have any probability associated with it, where as the rain data has a probability and amount so it could simply be that it's either a very low probability of rain or, that it's 0% cloud on average over the course of the hour but, there could be a few minutes where there is cloud. We pay for commercial weather data but profess to not being weather modelling experts ourselves so must rely on the data we get provided. Clear sky alerts is something still on my todo list but without a clear idea of how we are going to implement it - I am currently leaning towards a flexible system that would tie in with the settings panel I mention above - I suspect the tolerances at which people would want to be alerts, the frequency of those alerts and the quantity of alerts wanted will be different for everybody so I think we need to build a flexible system where people can choose the thresholds that matter for them in the locations they want to monitor, this will make it much more complex to build than the simple notifications I've seen on other apps but ultimately, it should be much more flexible and powerful which can only be a better thing for the people who use it. No ETA yet and the unit of measure and colour scheme settings will come first as these are requested more (and simpler to build!) - I also have a few other updates up my sleeve I want to get out soon too. Definitely, watch this space!

The timezone is taken from the forecast location itself and should already take into account DST - if you check the line at the top of the forecast it will show you the timezone and also the time the forecast was generated. If the forecast has just been generated assuming you are looking at a forecast for your current location, the generated time should pretty much match the current time. Hope that helps Cheers, Grant

That sounds rather odd - the frost row has the label 'Chance of Frost' next to it, but there are no links or anything like that. I've checked Clear Outside and can see no issues our end nor do I see any links. Can you send me a screen shot of what you see? I'm confident it's not the Clear Outside producing this link but it's possible some adware running on your computer that is injecting links into web pages for advertising purposes. There is adware out there that will pick out keywords in a web page and turn them into links.

Hi Tony, Try deleting that location and adding it again - it looks like when you did the address search, you've selected a location in Germany instead. I've just tried here, and I can add Skelmersdale OK so it does appear in the search list. Cheers, Grant