In your browser

app.hookecho.io is the whole application compiled to WebAssembly, running on live data, with nothing to install and no account. It’s the fastest way to try it, and it’s a perfectly good way to use it.

What’s the same

Nearly everything. Radar products and tilts, velocity dealiasing, Radar and Analyst modes, the task sections and Ctrl+S search, warnings and storm reports, the national mosaic, model layers, soundings, cross-sections, the 3D volume, and archive playback all the way back to 1991.

On an old machine

app.hookecho.io/lite/ is a second, much smaller page for hardware the full app asks too much of. It needs no WebGL and downloads about seventy kilobytes instead of five megabytes, because it draws the radar on the processor rather than the graphics card.

You get an animated loop of the last six scans, reflectivity or velocity, a picker for every NEXRAD site, three fixed zoom levels, and the tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings currently in view. There’s no panning, no archive and no other product — for those, use the full app or the desktop build.

What’s different

The browser doesn’t hand a web page everything a native app gets:

• Files. Importing colour tables or placefiles from disk, and exporting GIFs and MP4s, work best on the desktop build.
• Location. The browser asks before it shares it, and there’s no background GPS — chase mode is a desktop and Android feature.
• Background alerting. A tab that isn’t open can’t warn you. For alerts that reach you when the app is closed, use the phone app or leave the desktop build running.
• Speed. WebAssembly is fast, but a native build with your own GPU is faster. On a modest laptop, keep the pane count down.

Settings you change in the browser stay in that browser, on that machine.

Putting a radar on your own page

Adding ?embed to the URL strips the chrome and throttles the app when it isn’t visible, which is what you want inside an <iframe> on a dashboard. The same #goto deep links the app uses for sharing work in the browser too, so you can link straight to a site, a product and a moment in time.