Put days of week back into time slider
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The loss of the labeling for the days of the week in the timeline is a most unfortunate view and in terms of usability a step backwards from the past. While I always know the days I don't typically know the dates and I suspect most people are the same. For example, If I want to look at the weekend, I want to find Sat/Sun and not a specific date.
It looks like this crucial semantic information was lost as part of making the 15 day forecast fit without sliders. However, I'd rather have sliders and have an easy-- and confident-- way to be sure of which day I'm looking at.
(The point about confidence is an important one. It's very easy to mistake numbers for each other, but much harder to mistake characters.)
Perhaps one way to resolve this is to put a single character for the day of the week, e.g. in the screenshot T 4, W 5, etc...
It's not a problem that Sat and Sun have the same letters, as they're still easily identifiable. Likewise for Tue and Thu.
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As a suggestion, a graphic solution could be to use a different shade of gray for Saturday and Sunday to clearly mark the weeks. But I don’t know if it is easily feasible.
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@Suty said in Put days of week back into time slider:
@idefix37 @kubark42 Hi, we will discuss potential adjustments to recognize the weekend at least. I will talk to colleagues tomorrow.
Thanks! Although I don't think the problem is just about the weekend. When I plot my aviation course I go off days of the week relative to today, not the weekend. So making the weekend more visible is better than nothing, but for my purposes it's still worse than having just a 10 day forecast where there are strong, unambiguous differentiators between adjacent days. The three letter abbreviation manages this, as does just a single letter, but having a sea of numbers bookmarked by the weekends feels unnatural and errorprone.
For instance:
Sun 2 3 4 5 6 7 Sat 8--vs--
Sun 2 M 3 T 4 W 5 T 6 F 7 Sat 8I'm hopeful a suitable font can be found, or superscripts and subscripts, so that it's clear without taking up too much space.
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@kubark42 To clear this out, we offer abbreviations of days in the timeline. Our standard desktop version looks like this now:
But we limit and adjust the view with narrower display available for certain device.
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@Suty
Yes on desktop or laptop, but on IPad with smaller screen we get this
Personally I would prefer to have an incomplete timeline, as in the mobile app. I never check directly the forecast 15 days ahead.
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@Suty said in Put days of week back into time slider:
@kubark42 To clear this out, we offer abbreviations of days in the timeline. Our standard desktop version looks like this now:
But we limit and adjust the view with narrower display available for certain device.
Got it! The screenshot I posted was from my 15" MacBook gen4, with a comfortably wide browser screen. Only when I go to max width do I see the days like you show. And that's not usually a useful view for me as I can get all the map context I need from the narrower view.
@idefix37's viewpoint is shared perhaps by many of us: an unambiguous 10 day forecast is more user friendly than an ambiguous 15 day one.
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After a discussion with colleagues we decided to provide certain graphic improvement for the weekend days in the timeline.
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@Suty T, thank you! Every time I've used Windy of late I've had to intentionally drag the window to maximum resolution so that I can see the days of the week. It is definitely, for me at least, very unergonomic to try to correlate cardinal numbers to my thoughts on flight planning. This might be cultural or experiential based, but I only use date numbers for calendars, never for day-to-day operations.
Just last week, I used Windy extensively for a flight down the Appalachian mountains, so the mission importance of data clarity is not lost on me.
Looking forward to seeing what's next!
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@Suty any updates? I noticed that v46 dropped, but the timeline is still unusable unless the window is exaggeratedly stretched.
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@kubark42 Hi, v46 is still not available. It will be probably in May.
