Sailor & Cruise Weather Widget

Sailor & Cruise Weather Widget puts one card on your phone's home screen: your ship on the water, the weather at your position, and the days until you go home. It is an app by 7SHORT1LONG®, built by seafarers, for iPhone and Android.

What the card shows

Read it from the top left. The temperature, the condition in one or two words, the wind in knots. Next to it rides the ship you picked, on a sea that matches the weather outside.

Below the waterline sit three numbers. For crew they read ON BOARD, UNTIL HOME and PORTS: the day of the contract you are on, the days left until sign-off, and the port calls so far. The port number has a minus and a plus beside it, so you can correct it right on the widget.

The bar at the bottom is the contract in one line. It has seven short segments and one long one, and the seven short ones together are exactly as long as the long one. Half the contract fills the short segments. The second half is the long one. Crew will know the pattern: seven short, one long is the general emergency signal, and the name of this brand.

Tap the weather, get six days

Tap the weather block and the counters make room for a six-day outlook: one column per day with the high and a symbol. Tap again and the counters are back. The card only changes pages when you tap it. Tap the ship and the app opens on the vessel list.

The picture follows the sun

The app knows eleven kinds of weather, from clear sky to fog, sleet and thunderstorm, and holds each one as a day scene, a twilight scene and a night scene. Which one you see is worked out from the position of the sun where you are. At 0500 off Fujairah the card is dark. By the end of the morning watch it is not.

Three views in one app

On first start the app asks who is looking. The answer changes what the card counts.

Each view has its own page: the contract countdown for seafarers, the cruise countdown for guests and the ship widget for enthusiasts.

Crew also get milestones. On the morning you pass 25, 50, 75 and 99 percent of the contract, the phone tells you at 08:00.

Where the weather comes from

The forecast comes from MET Norway, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The app does not send your exact position to get it. It rounds the position to a tenth of a degree, roughly 11 km, sends that to our own weather server, and the server asks MET Norway. The widget fetches fresh weather by itself, also while the app is closed.

What stays on your phone

There is no account. Your vessel, your dates, your port calls and your settings stay on the phone. Four things can leave it: the rounded position for the weather, a push registration if you switch on Community News, your email address if you ask for a milestone code by email, and advertising data.

The app is free. It is paid for by a video ad from Google AdMob when you launch your widget, the step that saves your setup, and by links to our store. Changing a date later needs no new launch and no new ad.

Setting it up

Permissions, view, ship, dates, launch. Then the widget goes on the home screen. The setup guide for iPhone and Android walks through it, including what to do when a battery saver holds the widget back. How the PORTS number gets counted has its own page: the port call counter.

Questions people ask first

YES, WE ARE CREW.