HookEcho

Getting started

HookEcho asks for one thing on first launch: which radar you open to. Let it use your location and it picks the nearest one and gets out of the way. Otherwise, search the list — every radar in the network is in there by name or by its four-letter ID.

That’s the whole of setup. Everything else has a sensible default, and lives in Settings when you want to change it.

What you’re looking at

The app is a full-bleed map with three floating pieces over it:

  • The search pill, top-left. It opens the panel, which holds everything: the current radar, the product you’re viewing, its tilt, and every layer, window and tool the app has — each described in plain English.
  • The control column, on the right edge: layers, the background map, and an alert bell badged with the number of warnings covering your view. The colour scale for whatever you’re looking at floats there too.
  • The scrubber, along the bottom: the radar’s clock, a play button, a LIVE badge, and a time track with one tick per scan.

Nothing is docked. The map runs edge to edge underneath all of it.

If you remember one thing

Press Ctrl+K. It searches the panel, and Enter runs the top match. Every action in the app is in there — products, layers, windows, and “Fly to” for any place name. You never have to learn where anything lives.

Watch a storm, right now

  1. Pick the radar nearest the storm — Ctrl+K, type the ID or the city.
  2. Leave the product on Reflectivity (Z). That’s where the rain and hail are.
  3. Switch to Velocity (V) to see what the storm is doing — which way the air inside it is moving.
  4. Walk the tilt row to look higher into the storm. 0.5° is closest to the ground.
  5. The LIVE badge means you’re on the newest scan. Anything that moves you off it turns the badge off; click it to snap back.

Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. On a trackpad, pinch to zoom and swipe sideways to pan; on a touchscreen, two fingers do both.

Save the places you care about

Search a place in the panel and the map flies there, with a Save marker button. Markers are what the alerts watch — see Alerts and notifications.

Replay something that already happened

The timeline reaches back to June 1991. Right-click the LIVE badge, pick a day, and scrub. Warning polygons and storm reports come along with you: what was actually in force at the moment you’re parked on, not today’s.

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