Simplified Payment, Forecast Lists

It's that time again, and we in the SARWeather Development Team have updated our service. This time around, the changes are mostly about making it possible to pay for individual forecasts and to improve the behaviour of the system when you run out of credit.

SARWeather Adopts the Euro

Credits now roughly correspond to €1. In certain cases, such as in bulk orders, the credits may be sold at a discount, but in small volumes they will generally correspond to €1.

Since the credit previously corresponded to about €2, we have doubled the number of credits charged for each forecast, and doubled the credit balance of all current users.

Simplified Payment

Until now, users had to separately purchase credits for their account and then use those credits to generate forecasts. If you had insufficient credit for a particular forecast, then you might have to throw away the incomplete order to purchase credits. This system was awkward and confusing and has been significantly improved.

Now, when a forecast costs more credits than you have in your account, a dialogue-box appears offering you to pay the exact amount missing, modify the forecast, or even to buy additional credits to avoid the hassle for the next few forecasts.

Dialogue box offering to pay the exact amount needed for the forecast.

If you abandon the forecast when the payment dialogue appears, the order is still not lost. It will appear in your list of previous forecasts, and clicking it there will return to the forecast and you can re-submit it.

Improved Previous Forecasts

We've continued improving the list of previous forecasts. As mentioned above, the list now includes forecasts which were put on hold because of insufficient credit. They are deliberately made to look like the cards for failed forecasts, and in both cases you can now press the little red X icon to remove them from your list.

The preview map on each card now has an actual weather forecast overlay. For now, the preview shows a wind plot, but we expect to replace it with a composite plot showing wind, temperature and precipitation.

Previous foreasts list showing an on-hold forecast, two up-to-date foreasts and one  whih an be re-generated with newer data.

We have also slightly re-considered the colour coding of the forecast cards and added a helpful legend at the bottom of the page. The short version is that you want your cards to be green or cyan to show that they are completely up-to-date.

Upcoming Changes

In the next update we will focus on adding a couple of useful new weather maps, including the composite map mentioned above and probably a wind-chill map. We might also be able to squeeze in a map showing accumulated precipitation over the forecast period.

If you have suggestions for changes or additional features, don't hesitate to send us feed-back.