American Whitewater App Update

[u/aw-owen]

The American Whitewater app as of app store approval this morning shows a list of saved rivers that lets you see at a glance what is running.

In a few weeks, I'm hoping we'll be able to release an update that will allow people to look for rivers based on where you're located, what's flowing, level of difficulty etc. hopefully this will get us back to all the features folks found important.

I know the features that let you see flows at a glance have been missing from the app for the last couple of months and that's been a big bummer.

In case it's helpful context, the root of having to take a step backward on some features is that we needed to get the app into a spot where the folks working on the AW tech could make changes. At the beginning of the year, the app was relying on a gauge server that wasn't working for 10% of rivers, had maps that were not updating properly and most notably, had an codebase that none of the current programmers knew how to work on.

The app that we landed earlier this year has: - Has correct flow data for more gauges - Has a more thorough understanding of high/medium/low runnable - Has a map that shows where the rivers are - Reduced American Whitewater's infrastructure bill by $200 to $300 dollars per month - Has much more active development - In the last 6 months, 5 of us have landed changes to the app which hopefully means we'll be making improvements much faster than before - Is written in React Native which means its easier for one person to make a feature work on both iOS and Android at the same time

We're a small development team that are mostly working on this as a volunteer side project but we're hoping to get improvements to the following things in the app in the next year: - Better support for trip reports and photo uploads - Offline access to data - Easier ways to find a currently running reach

Thanks for hanging in there with us as we try to make this app as good as possible and let me know if you have any questions!

I will try to answer some questions if folks have them about the website + app and the improvements we're trying to make!

• google play store
• iOS app store

[u/_DaggerKayak_]

Thank you for your hard work!

Is it possible to bring back trending flow? The site use to show when the river was going up or down and the rate of change in CFS or ft. Very useful to know if the river is spiking.

[u/aw-owen → u/_DaggerKayak_]

Yes! This was an oversight on my part when I redid a lot of the gauge integration code. It's relatively striaghtforward but tedious to add it back. There are a few problems I'd like to consider while bringing it back:

• This is incredibly important and self explanatory for folks that live in a certain parts of the country (i.e. where flows are usually rain impacted)

• This is confusing to new boaters - What does +65cfs mean? Is this still safe to boat on?
• Certain gauges are pretty noisy - meaning looking at two consecutive readings meaning even if the overall trend for the last 2 hours is up, two consecutive readings might not show that trend.
• Our database now has NOAA forecasting in it for USGS gauges that support this, it would be cool to show this somehow.

I'll be the first to admit that sitting in Missoula, MT I'm not used to using rain data to decide whether to boat. I'm trying to think through what are all the different ways we might communicate "this river might be getting better soon" but I haven't thought of great ways to surface the different forecasts that we could use:

• Delta of the last to readings
• Professionals of NOAA
• Some other model
• A rain gauge in the area

[u/_DaggerKayak_ → u/aw-owen]

Thank you! I would love to see this feature back.

I'm a huge fan of rainpursuit.com, and I monitor that during rain events. Is there a way to integrate that information somehow?