PARAGLIDING MAP - News

I have finally found the time to merge all the data sources the way I originally wanted to implement it 5 years ago. Now if the DHV have the altitude and Paragliding Earth has the star rating, for example, you will see BOTH pieces of information in the site details. Previously, I resolved duplicates by simply turning off one of the sites. Now you can also view the site at the original data source.

In addition, many "chaff" locations have been removed, and all importers (Paragliding Earth, FFVL, Flyland, DHV) have been rewritten. This means I can run the importers more often, resulting in up-to-date data.

There are a lot of paragliders in Brazil, and now they have their own Brazilian-Portugues version of the website, thanks to Anacleto who did the translations.

All features of Paragliding Map have been upgraded to Google Maps v3. You should notice the site is now faster, and works better on retina displays (such as the Macbook Retina).

Since I released the sister KitesurfingMap.com a week ago, I have updated Paragliding Map with the new theme.

 

As well as looking better, you will notice some of the new features from Kitesurfing Map have come over to Paragliding Map, such as the new current conditions graphic on the site details page. An example is on the right, and shows a site which takes wind directions from the NW, W & SW, with the current wind coming from NE. This new graphic makes it much easier to quickly see if a site is flyable or not, and why.

 

You can now add your own webcams for any site. Just click the "Add Webcam" button in the webcams area.

Flyland.ch have kindly allowed the importation of their entire Swiss flying site database, which is now available on the website and apps (including the free versions). Duplicate sites have been removed to prevent double-ups, so you may see some changes.

Thanks to thermal.kk7.ch, thermals are now displayed on the map as a new layer. These thermals are not calculated, they are REAL thermals that were detected by analysing hundreds of thousands of logged flights. The thermal hotspot markers are displayed where the flight data shows thermals consistently appear.

In addition, you will notice that you can now switch layers on and off as required. There are also a few other nice UI tweaks.

The favourites feature allows you to view and manage your preferred sites on a single convenient page.

The FFVL (Fédération Française de Vol Libre) have kindly allowed Paragliding Map to display their paragliding sites and weather station data. The FFVL have roughly 150 high quality weather stations on some of the most popular paragliding sites in France. These weather stations have been linked automatically on the map to calculate flyablity for all FFVL launches.

Full site details are now displayed in the popup window where available (mostly Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and France). More to come later!

DHV (the national German hang- and paragliding club) sites are now imported regularly, including site details. The DHV have kindly made their information available via an XML feed. Sites from the DHV are mainly located in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and France.

At present, the sites need to be imported manually, but the process is largely automated. If you notice anything is too out-of-date, flick me an email and I will run the importer for you. Otherwise you can wait for the next import.

Landing areas from Paragliding Earth are now also displayed on the map. Open the legend (on the map) for details.

Paragliding Map is now available as a free iOS app from the App Store. Now you can experience Paragliding Map on your iPhone! The iOS version of Paragliding Map has some great features which are exclusive to the iOS version, such as the ability to display over 16,000 webcams directly on the map.

Click here for full details about Paragliding Map for iOS.

Paragliding Map is now available as an Android app from the Android Marketplace. Now you can experience all the information of Paragliding Map in the palm of your hand... plus a little extra!

Click here for full details about Paragliding Map for Android.

Thanks to Johann Gorlier, the following pages have now been translated into French. This leaves only a few small things which remain in English, allowing French users to use almost the entire site in their own language! Thanks to all the other people who have also contributed translations in the past.

• The entire details popup page.
• The Widget (embed on your site) page.
• About Us
• A bunch of mis-spelled or mis-translated stuff.

 

Previously Windfinder forecasts in the site details page were in English only. French and German are now supported.

For French and German users, the "acceptable wind directions" were always in English, which could lead to confusion. This has been fixed.

Many new French translations have been added, and existing translations have been corrected. Thanks to the following people for submitting native translations:

• Timothée Manaud
• Yves (from Reims, France)
• Laurent

 

For some reason, many sites were missing out on forecasts even though there were forecasts available. 700 of these sites should now have accurate forecasts from WindFinder, so check out your local sites again if flyability was not being calculated for you previously.

I just figured out that the "add to your site" feature of the forecast widget was always displaying the same site, which is obviously a bug. This has now been fixed - sorry about that. If you see a bug on this site, please tell me about it and I will fix it.

Apparently French people like to go paragliding (shock!), so I have had the main features translated into French. The translator's language experience was partying in Paris for a year, so please let me know if any of the translations are incorrect. Don't forget everything is also available auf Deutsch, and of course English.

If my favourite paragliding site's not currently flyable, I often want to know when it will be flyable, dagnabbit! (Mostly because I'm too lazy to go elsewhere.) The new flyability forecast answers this question with the Paragliding Map happy face (see right).

Oh, did I forget to mention you can add flyability forecasts to your own website? Just click "Add this to your own website" at the bottom of the forecast for details. Go crazy!

Webcams from webcams.travel have been added to 446 paragliding sites, and can be seen in the right-hand column of the site details.

Some examples:

• St. Hilaire, France
• Mont Blanc, France
• Dunstable, UK
• Point of the Mountain, Utah, USA
• Hahnenkamm, Kitzbühel, Austria

 

Private webcams can also be displayed on Paragliding Map. If you would like a webcam hooked up, please let me know.

Some people were getting confused as to why a southerly site was flyable with a northerly in some cases (for example). The reason is because there is no wind (less than 3 kph)! I have added some notes under the "This site is flyable!" statement to explain WHY the site is marked as flyable if this might be confusing. This way pilots can decide whether they agree with the logic or not.

I don't know about you, but when I click on a paragliding site I always found the Google default "popup bubbles" annoying. If the paragliding site was on the edge of the map it would scroll, not much information could be displayed there and if you opened the full details page and clicked "back" you would have to reload the map, etc.

Now when you click on a site you will see a new "site details dialog" appear. This new dialog is a lot more user-friendly and can fit all the site details without needing to re-load the map when you close the dialog.

iPhones, Android phones and devices running Windows Mobile should now automatically redirect to the mobile version of Paragliding Map. This is a special version of Paragliding Map designed to fit on small screens.

Given the wide variety of web-enabled devices on the market, please let me know how your mobile experience goes. I would especially like to know if you have problems, but would also appreciate positive feedback.

Found and fixed a nasty little bug where I realised old information was being displayed under certain conditions. This resulted in old data (over a month old!) being displayed with current data.

While the remainder of the site remains English, the primary "map" function and menu has been translated into German.

The new comments feature I wanted to build required logged in users, but if you're like me, you probably hate creating a different profile on every site you use. For this reason, ParaglidingMap.com uses your Facebook profile instead.

If you look at the top right corner of this page, you will see there is a new "Login with Facebook" button. In order to use the new comments feature, you need to click this button to allow ParaglidingMap.com to see your Facebook account. Once you're logged in, you will see your profile picture and a welcome message.

If you don't have a Facebook profile (or don't want one!), no problem! You will still be able to read comments, but you will not be able to post new comments yourself. As time goes by however, additional Facebook integration features will be added which you will miss out on without an account.

The DHV (German hangliding and paragliding club) has just released their new list of official sites. This includes:

• 1,048 new sites.
• 453 sites already on ParaglidingMap.com, but with updated information.

All this information is now available to view on the map. If you are flying in one of the following countries, you will find many more sites are now available, and that information for existing sites is more complete.

• Germany
• France
• Switzerland
• Austria
• Italy
• Slovenia

 

Please note that it will take a couple of days to start generating forecasts for the new sites. If forecasts are not available by the 29th, please send me an email and I will investigate for you.

Only weather stations with reports less than 180 minutes (3 hours) are now displayed. This removes a lot of clutter from the map.

As has always been the case, weather reports "fade out" as they get older so fresher reports are brighter and not transparent. After 180 minutes, weather reports are no longer displayed on the map at all, but will re-appear if a fresh report is received.

Now you can add a widget to your own website like the one below, showing the flyable sites around the Mont Blanc region in France.
Set up a flyability widget for your club or website..

A whole bunch of new feature have been released in version 2.0 of ParaglidingMap.com, mostly related to forecasts.

• Forecasts: where will it be flyable tomorrow? Or the next day?

  ParaglidingMap.com can now answer the question "where will it be flyable at 2pm tomorrow?".

  WindFinder.com is providing a special forecast feed to ParaglidingMap.com, allowing forecasts to be displayed as markers on the map. This is much more useful than the old "forecasts" tab in the site balloons, because you can now see the flyability forecasts on the map in the same way you see current conditions.

  Additionally, WindFinder is producing custom forecasts for the exact latitude and longitude of each paragliding spot. This means forecasts are as accurate as possible.

  

• "Current conditions" are way more accurate.

  You may have noticed that the quality of current conditions data has improved. Also, some sites that didn't used to have a weather station assigned to them can now be displayed as flyable or not flyable. There are a couple of reasons for this:

  1. Only weather stations less than 25km away are used for each site. Previously they just used the closest one, which was sometimes too far away to be accurate.
  2. For sites that don't have a weather station, the current forecast from WindFinder is used instead. There is a new label in the site balloon displaying the data source (right next to the age of the observation), so you know whether the observation is coming from a weather station or a forecast.

   

• Site marker colours changed.

  Many people have requested a change to the flyability icon colours displayed on the map. Most people associate red with danger, therefore non-flyable sites are now marked in red, while flyable sites are marked in yellow.

• New site markers added.

  In addition to the new colour scheme for site markers, two new types of site marker have been introduced.

  The marker indicates a site for which wind information is unknown - therefore flyability cannot be calculated. When you see one of these, please update the site and enter the missing information.

  The marker indicates a site that has no weather station or no forecast data.

The flyability calculation has been changed to accommodate soaring sites, which can handle higher wind. If a site is a known soaring site, this is now taken into consideration.

ParaglidingMap.com is now integrated right into Paragliding Earth. On the site details page, scroll down a bit and you will see a compact version of the ParaglidingMap.com map displayed inline.

A lot of pilots are asking me a bunch of questions about ParaglidingMap.com, so I figured it would be a good idea to create a page explaining a few things about the site.

Paragliding sites are now automatically imported every 24 hours from Paragliding Earth. This means that when you create a new site on Paragliding Earth, or update an existing one, it will be available the next day on ParaglidingMap.com. Previously paragliding sites were loaded by hand, and only seldom.

Don't forget, you can use the new "Update information for this site" link to go directly to the correct page on Paragliding Earth to update site information. You can find this link in the popup bubble when you click on a site.

Most locations in Western Europe, the European Alps and the United States now have forecasts provided by WindFinder.com. Only paragliding sites with a forecast location within 50km are currently displaying forecast information, but soon all paragliding sites will have accurate forecasts specifically generated for their locations.

Technical issues caused some outages today. These issues have been permanently resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this.

If information about your favourite sites is incorrect, now you can update it. Click on a site, and then click on the "update information for this site" link.