Anniversary and a Major Update for Wingit on Web

Retrospective 🫣

On May 2nd 2023, Wingit was first publicly announced to the public with major features such as:

• flying sites,
• live weather and webcams,
• paraglidable forecast,
• airspaces,
• glide range calculations,
• and thermal maps.

Since, Wingit has gained a plethora of additional features like:

• point weather forecasts including ICON-D2,
• live tracking,
• tracking history,
• a hiking as well as XC planner,
• live rain radar,
• and many more live weather providers.

Unfortunately, late ‘23 the world lost the incredible and previously free Stamen topological map tiles. While I’ve added a few more map providers since, none of them have managed to itch quite the same spot, at least for me. I did briefly consider paying for proprietary maps out of pocket, however it’s hard to justify for a free hobby project. Anyone out there with connections to the likes of Stadia, Maptiler, or Mapbox and willing to support a good cause? 😉

How is Wingit doing? 📈

At this point, Wingit has roughly 1.5k active installs on Android and 1k on iOS, with an unknown number of web users (I don’t track users). In the time since the donation link has been up, I’ve received a total of 145$, which excluding cuts amounts to roughly 100$ covering the operational cost for roughly 5 months.

What’s in store for the future? 🔮

Firstly, I’d like to announce that Wingit’s web version (see “Map” in the top right) is now more closely tracking the mobile versions and as such gained some features like glide range calculations, hiking as well as XC planners 🎉. I’m announcing this with one crying eye. Originally, I had some plans to build a more optimized version for web, however with everything else on my plate it turned out to be more of a distraction. In the end, I’m happy to have finally bitten the bullet: everything should be more unified now and hopefully y’all get more mileage. I’d be curious to hear what you think. The previous map is still up, at least for now, if you’d like to compare.

Maybe a bit on the nose but this news section, is also fresh of the conveyor. If you’d like to stay up-to-day consider subscribing to the RSS feed or let me know if you’d prefer some other means.

I’ve also started working a while back on social features as well as community editable sites. Though I don’t wanna make any commitments or promises since it’s a metric ton of work. At the end of the day you’d need all the qualities of a wiki including account management, quality assurance, ownership and delegation, …

Parting Words

It has been a wild ride and a lot of work. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, kind words, and donations especially. You kept me going - thank you so much 💖.

If you haven’t gotten involved so far, help is always welcome, whether it’s a stern bug report, feature requests, or more immediate contributions. I’d also be happy to consider a sponsorship placement, if they were a good fit and helped to make Wingit a better platform. Don’t be shy and reach out to [email protected].

Thanks again,
Sebastian 👋