Jim in NC wrote:
How much less bandwidth than with the commercial apps? What you
thinking for a price?

TAFs and METARs are simply downloaded and displayed. They're typically
maybe a hundred bytes each, if that. My app has no real bandwidth
advantage over the web browser if you know the URL for the TAF/METAR
you want and you don't need to load some sort of a query page like ADDS
(hint: try
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/obs...tions/K???.TXT,
replace ??? with a station identifier in caps). RADAR images are GIF
files that are typically 15-30k bytes each. Satellite images are
100k-300k jpg's. The original poster said he doesn't want graphics
because he's paying a penny a kilobyte, meaning a 10-frame radar or sat
animation could cost several dollars to view, which does seem
unreasonable to me too. I feel less bandwidth constrained using wi-fi
that I leech for free wherever I can and that I can see becoming more
ubiquitous with time (on a tangent, I believe we'll have cheap wireless
TCP/IP in the cockpit as well as in the coffee shop before long). I
also feel that a picture is worth a thousand words and I'd rather see
animated radar and photos than a TAF if I had to choose between them.
The bandwidth savings gained using my app versus a web browser comes
from the fact that I avoid the overhead associated with downloading the
ADDS (or wherever) html page to query for a METAR or TAF and I avoid
the html AND a java applet (which may or may not run on my Pocket PC
anyway) to see an animation.

I've also discovered that animating the ADDS prog charts (displaying
them in timed sequence) gives an interesting "big picture" of the
weather over the next few days that I haven't seen anywhere else.

As for price, I'd charge the maximum that the market will bear. .
I'm toying with the idea of giving the application away for free, with
some limited functionality, say maybe METARs but not TAFs and still
images but not animation, and charging a license fee to add the ability
to view TAFs, RADAR and sat animation, and to stay updated as data
source locations change (or better yet, a modest regular subscription
fee to motivate me to keep links current and to keep looking for new
and interesting sources of data). As to what the fee would be exactly,
I'm not yet in a position to gauge what the market will bear. What
would you be willing to pay?

-R