Changelog

Notable changes per release, newest first. Every tagged release’s body on GitHub is this file’s matching section, extracted by .github/workflows/release.yml — so write the section before pushing the tag, or the release job fails.

The rolling latest release tracks main and is not listed here.

0.12.0-beta.1 - 2026-08-26

Second R18 checkpoint. The phone gets the same chrome the desktop got in alpha.1, onboarding stops asking questions, and the data lanes land. Still a prerelease: a few lanes (RRFS, the remaining store submissions) come at 0.12.0.

The phone

• The persistent bottom sheet and the five-slot toolbar are gone. The phone draws the same floating chrome the desktop does — search pill, control column, scrubber — with content in Material modal sheets instead of a drawer. Predictive back still works.
• Long-press the map to inspect what is under your finger, double-tap and drag to zoom with one hand, swipe sideways between panes.
• Haptics: ticks as the scrubber crosses a frame, a buzz when a warning lands on you, a bump when a sheet snaps.
• Tablets and landscape phones get a side rail and a docked drawer instead of sheets.
• Widgets show how far the nearest storm is. A battery-saver mode stretches the poll cadence and throttles repaints. On a chase, the next radar down the road is prefetched before you need it, and a chase can be replayed against the archive afterwards.

Getting started

• The setup wizard is gone. First run finds you, picks the nearest radar and draws it — about ten seconds, no questions.
• Notification permission is asked for when you turn on something that notifies, or when a warning lands near you. Never at install.
• One help hub behind ?: glossary, hotkeys, the tour and what’s new, all searchable in one place. Labels across the app read in plain language, with the abbreviation kept in parentheses for anyone who wants it.
• Text products — area forecast discussions, tropical advisories — render in a real webview with real typography, on both desktop and Android.

Weather

• GOES loops run over archive dates alongside the radar timeline, and the mid-level water vapor bands are selectable.
• MRMS rotation tracks (30/60/120 minutes) are field layers now, and hail swaths accumulate locally over a window you choose.
• Snow squalls and banding get their own emphasis in winter.
• An alert rule can trigger on a lightning jump — the rate of change of flash density inside a cell.
• NAM nest and NBM join the model list. Synoptic mesonets join the surface obs, with your own API key.
• Cells are ranked by a composite severity score, and tapping one opens the 3D volume already centered on it.
• Panes remember their own thresholds and field layers. Events can be saved as replay bundles — time range, site, camera — and replayed with archived radar, warnings, reports and outlooks in sync.

The web build

• Installable as a PWA, with the app shell cached offline.
• Tiles, volumes and palettes persist between visits.
• File dialogs, GPS and notifications all work in the browser now.
• A share button writes a permalink that carries the site, camera and time.

Elsewhere

• MQTT publishing, a Home Assistant camera loop endpoint and a live dashboard at the --serve index.
• An update chip appears when a newer release exists. No self-updating.
• Motion throughout, with reduce_motion and an automatic degrade on slow frames. Labels, roles and focus order on all of the new chrome.
• The application id is io.hookecho.HookEcho, and every screenshot in the README, the store listings and this repo was reshot on the new chrome.

0.12.0-alpha.1 - 2026-08-25

First R18 checkpoint: the desktop and web chrome, rebuilt. A prerelease — the mobile chrome is still the old sheet-and-toolbar layout, and the data lanes land later in the cycle.

• The docked sidebar and the docked timeline bar are gone. The map runs edge to edge, and everything that used to eat it now floats over it: a search pill top-left, a control column down the right edge beside the color scale, and a scrubber pill along the bottom with time ticks, play, a LIVE badge and the loop range.
• Tools you browse rather than watch — settings, the event library, alert rules — open as pages in one slide-over drawer with a back-stack, one page at a time, on every platform. Anything you click on the map answers in a card anchored next to the click instead of in a window wherever egui last left one.
• The window is borderless: its three buttons float with the rest of the chrome, the empty strip along the top edge drags it, double-clicking that strip maximizes, and any edge or corner resizes. --decorated hands the frame back to your window manager if it disagrees.
• Design tokens: one metrics module with a Comfortable default and a Compact density, the theme list curated to six, a free accent color, and Inter bundled on every platform including web.
• The 60-second tour now points at the chrome that exists; the keyboard cheat sheet and every hotkey work unchanged; workspaces round-trip and now also remember which panel and drawer page were open.
• Streamer (OBS) mode and ?embed=1 strip all of the new chrome, same as before.

0.11.0 - 2026-08-25

• Basemaps stopped being an afterthought: every pane now draws its own style instead of borrowing the active pane’s, tiles are fetched at retina resolution and overzoomed from the deepest resident ancestor rather than going blank, the built-in vector cartography gained buildings, a full road ladder and POIs, and the 40-item dropdown became a categorized thumbnail grid on both desktop and Android. New sources: keyless hybrid satellite (Esri imagery under our own labels), the Esri gray/NatGeo/Oceans canvases, an “Auto” entry that follows the theme, and a custom XYZ template on desktop and Android.
• The live data path no longer re-merges the whole volume per chunk, which is what made a site switch stall and left seams across a partial sweep. Label placement, alert rows and the desktop frame loop were profiled and fixed in that order; the Android loop cache and site-switch fetches now run in parallel.
• Alerts identify a warning by its VTEC event key instead of its message id, so a continuation stops re-firing; an outbreak collapses into one rolling summary past a threshold; webhooks retry with backoff; Android gained exact alarms, a battery-exemption prompt, a watchdog and a delivery-health readout; and the spoken script leads with hazard, place and direction through an optional local neural voice.
• The rules engine can attach a snapshot, play a per-rule sound, combine conditions with one level of AND/OR, and backtest a rule against archived volumes.
• Radar accuracy: dealiasing scores region merges by boundary vote and anchors on the previous sweep, gate edges stay crisp under smoothing, and beam height uses each site’s real tower height instead of a flat 20 m.
• Products the app could not show: specific differential phase (KDP, derived from the phase field already fetched), single-site composite reflectivity, a gate inspector that reads every moment at the gate under the cursor, MRMS precipitation rate, nowcast leads out to 120 minutes drawn faintly enough to read as a guess, an archive date picker, a wind row on the meteogram, trend sparklines in the cells table, NHC advisory and discussion text, TFRs and G-AIRMETs, and reflectivity tinted by precipitation type.
• German radar. DWD’s open data is the only keyless international volume feed there is — seventeen sites, five-minute volumes, reflectivity only. The browser build does not offer it; a volume is 4.4 MB and the web build fetches through a shared cache.
• A share link can carry the reflectivity threshold (thr:25, or thr:off), which is what an embedded dashboard needs to open at its own threshold without changing anyone else’s defaults.

0.10.0 - 2026-08-14

• The browser build can be embedded in another page’s dashboard: ?embed hides all chrome and holds the map at one frame a minute until it is touched, so a radar living in someone else’s iframe stops costing them a CPU core.
• An embedded map hands its view (site, product, tilt, basemap, camera) to the page hosting it once a second, and takes one back through the share link’s new bm:<basemap> and srv fields. Browsers partition an iframe’s storage, so the host is the only place an embedded view can persist — this is what stops WeatherDesk’s radar resetting on every launch.
• A lost graphics context or a panic after startup now says so instead of leaving the last frame on screen forever.
• cargo run -p wxdata --example sites_json dumps the radar site registry for embedders that want a site picker without the crate.

0.9.0 - 2026-08-11

• Three dual-pol signatures the app never computed: three-body scatter spikes (near-proof of large hail), ZDR columns (an updraft proxy that deepens before a storm intensifies), and the melting-layer bright band. Off by default, and none of them makes a sound — the only detection that alarms is still the one that means debris is in the air.
• Satellite lightning gains a density field: where the GLM flashes are thickest over the last 15 minutes, which is where a lightning jump shows up first.
• Colorblind-safe reflectivity and velocity palettes ship built in, alongside an OLED theme, a caption on share cards, a new-scan chime, and beam height on the Measure tool.
• Alerting learns restraint and reach: quiet hours with a severity floor, rotation near a place you watch, alerting on your own live position, and a radar snapshot attached to the push. Pushes held back by quiet hours now come back as one summary when the window ends, instead of vanishing.
• The GOES frame follows the radar’s clock, so scrubbing back through an event takes the satellite with it.
• SPC Day 4-8 outlooks and TAFs on station tooltips.
• A chase breadcrumb log with GPX export, and desktop notifications.
• Android: a home-screen radar widget and a quick-settings tile.
• A small always-on-top mini-loop window on the desktop, and a Debian package next to the AppImage so the menu entry, icon and updater are the system’s job.
• A crash the app can explain: a panic now leaves a report, and the next start offers it back with a Copy button. Nothing in it identifies you.
• Fuzzing the decoders that eat outside bytes found four real bugs — a panic on a half-written volume from the live head, two hangs on malformed GRIB2, and a parser that died on a mangled hurricane-hunter bulletin. All fixed, all now regression-tested, with the fuzz job running nightly.
• First run is four cards and an optional spotlight tour on the real interface, down from ten pages of wizard.
• Trackpad pinch zooms and horizontal scroll pans; hookecho:// links reach an already-running instance and carry product and tilt; placefile icon sheets cache on disk; a temperature unit the station plots honor.
• Errors you can read, copy and actually see, and a sweep of the unwraps behind decoded and user-supplied data.

0.8.0 - 2026-08-09

• A model difference layer: GFS−ECMWF and HRRR−RAP, resampled onto a common grid and drawing nothing where the two models agree.
• Effective-layer severe parameters on the full pressure ladder, up to 100 hPa, so the depth-dependent ones exist on the days they describe.
• Soundings fetch the 150 and 100 hPa levels, so a parcel has an equilibrium level instead of running off the top of the profile.
• CI opens the built web bundle in a real headless browser — the check cargo check --target wasm32 structurally cannot perform.
• Saved workspaces appear in the command palette without “Show all”; CSV export writes a file, not just the clipboard.
• Android: the dialog shim can reach the activity handle again.

0.7.0 - 2026-08-09

• GPU wind particles, advected in a fragment shader with the CPU mesh kept as a fallback (HOOKECHO_CPU_WIND=1).
• Packaging: Flatpak, Snap, Homebrew and winget manifests, AppStream metadata, a full icon theme, and an experimental macOS app bundle built in CI.
• Android imports files through the Storage Access Framework.
• Workspaces remember field layers, and three starter layouts ship with the app.
• --snapshot writes a radar PNG for desktop widgets; /snapshot.png takes size and zoom.
• A Storage tab that shows and clears every disk cache.
• Live chunk streaming in the browser, so a web tab updates sweep by sweep.
• Accessibility: the widget tree is published to screen readers, plus a high-contrast palette.
• True lunar phase (Meeus) instead of the mean synodic month.
• Soundings: effective-layer parameters on the clicked profile, and CSV export of the profile and its indices.

0.6.0 - 2026-08-09

• Saved workspaces: pane layouts stored and restored.
• Archived Level 2 volumes and zone geometry kept on disk across restarts.
• GFS and ECMWF global model fields.
• Forecast-hour soundings with a full parcel, lapse rates and effective-inflow parameters.
• User-drawn watch zones that fire when a warning polygon enters them.
• 3D: reflectivity threshold, axis slicing, and off-thread volume building.
• Chase pack street tiles beside raster imagery; wildfire feeds fully paged.
• Container image published to ghcr.io; hookecho:// URL scheme registered.
• Performance: parallel site switches, faster live-stream start, fewer per-frame allocations.

0.5.0 - 2026-07-25

• Time-height wind profile (VWP) panel.
• WPC surface analysis fronts overlay.
• Rain-arrival ETA for saved locations and your chase position.
• Tap anywhere for the NWS point forecast.
• New warnings read aloud.
• Cross-sections slice velocity and correlation coefficient, not just reflectivity; compare-4-tilts pane preset.
• First-run tutorial rebuilt around the app as it is now.

0.4.0 - 2026-07-20

• Android port: the same codebase as a NativeActivity APK (arm64-v8a).
• Per-pane product picker for multi-pane layouts.

0.3.0 - 2026-07-19

• Hydrometeor classification, live and archived local storm reports, an AFD viewer, and hail sizing.

0.2.0 - 2026-07-19

• Warning intelligence, archived warnings, probabilistic outlooks, and CAPE/SRH environment overlays.
• Live-loop playback, selectable alert sounds, marker icons, more basemaps.

0.1.0 - 2026-07-18

• First release: Level 2 / Level 3 NEXRAD viewing on a wgpu + egui map, with archive replay and NWS alerts.