0.25.0

July 10, 2026

• New — Atmosphere Profile: a readable ladder of the air above you — temperature, dewpoint, and wind at six heights — with plain-language takeaways: the freezing level, moisture depth, and whether the air aloft favors tall storms. Data tab.
• New — Weather Diary: jot the moments (hail size, first frost, that wall cloud) and each note is stamped with the conditions at the time. Stays on your computer — never uploaded.
• New — Service status page: live checks of the update channel and self-hosted map, right from your browser.

0.24.0

July 10, 2026

• New — Radar palettes: swap the loop radar between 8 color schemes (Classic TV, NEXRAD Level III, Universal Blue, Dark Sky, …) plus a smoothing on/off toggle.
• New — Household impact: the dashboard lists which of your saved places are under warnings or watches, each place named.
• New — Good windows planner: dry, comfortable stretches in the next 36 hours — when to mow, walk the dog, or paint the fence.
• New — Compared to normal: today's high vs the last 10 years of this exact week at your spot — "8° above normal for early July."
• New — Share a conditions card: one click saves a clean PNG of current conditions and risk level, ready to text or post.
• New — Explain the jargon: a Forecast Discussion toggle annotates CAPE, shear, drylines and 35+ other terms in plain English.
• Warning freshness: every warning says how old it is — "Issued 12 min ago" vs "almost expired — a follow-up should arrive soon."
• On-map countdown chips: a warned storm tracking toward one of your places gets a chip reading "→ Home · 22 min."
• Sunday week-ahead digest, aurora for your latitude, threat-adaptive accent colors, and a restructured, faster-starting core.

0.23.0

July 10, 2026

• New — Push to your phone: paste a free ntfy topic URL in Settings and take-cover alarms, warnings, watchlist hits, and escalations mirror to your phone at high priority. No account, no middleman.
• New — Workspace presets: Ctrl+K → "Preset" for one-click layer stacks — Storm Day, Winter, Hurricane, Minimal.
• New — Value under cursor: hovering the Composite or Velocity radar reads the intensity beneath your mouse — "≈45 dBZ — intense storm core, hail likely" or "inbound · strong".
• New — "Why?" on the safety strip: one click lists exactly what's driving the risk level — every active alert with its expiry, the inbound storm, the SPC outlook.
• Warning-edge distance: the storm narrative now says where you stand — "you are ~4 mi inside the tornado warning" or "the warned area begins ~7 mi east."
• Alarm escalation: a take-cover alarm at home also pulses the screen red (reduced-motion aware) and pushes to your phone if configured.

0.22.1

July 10, 2026

• Fix: after inspecting a warning or opening Settings there was no way back to the at-a-glance overview — the side panel now has a "Back to overview" button, and Escape returns you there too.

0.22.0

July 10, 2026

• New — Famous-outbreak replays: Ctrl+K → "Replay" and watch Moore 2013, Joplin 2011, the 2011 Super Outbreak, the Mayfield December tornado, or Harvey stall over Houston — the time machine jumps to the moment, the camera flies to the storm, and a caption tells the story. The archive now reaches back to 2011.
• New — "Will it rain on me?": a 15-minute nowcast bar for the next 2½ hours at the viewed place — "Rain reaching you around 6:40 PM (~35 min), turning heavy near 7:10."
• New — 3D storms: severe cells rise off the map as columns — taller means more water held aloft (VIL). Layers → 3D storms tilts the camera; dangerous storms literally tower.
• New — Cell dossier: click a ProbSevere storm → "Follow this cell" — the camera tracks it while sparklines chart its severe/tornado probabilities over the last hour. Organizing, or dying?
• New — Lightning sounds (off by default): a soft crackle per fresh strike while the lightning layer is on. Toggle via Ctrl+K.
• Storm cinema: radar loop exports now carry a caption bar — place, date, frankweather.com — so a saved loop is a shareable story.
• Fix: the self-hosted basemap could go black on some launches (a caching subtlety with partial downloads of the map archive). Resolved server-side and in-app.

0.21.0

July 10, 2026

• New — FUTURE radar: drag the scrubber INTO the future. The HRRR model's simulated radar shows where storms are expected, hour by hour out to +18 h, with the clock time each frame represents (Radar menu → Future). Clearly badged as a forecast, not observations.
• "What's happening": a plain-language story of the current picture on the dashboard — what's in effect here, what's inbound and when, what's nearby but missing you, and today's outlook. Written from live data on every refresh.
• Next-24-hours threat ribbon: one glanceable bar for the day — quiet, rain, storms, severe window, or an actual warning in force — with a summary like "Severe storm window 6–9 PM."
• "What this means" hazard cards: warnings' tagged hail and wind translated into real things — "golf ball size: dents vehicles and damages roofs", "70 mph: trees and power lines come down."
• STORM MODE: when a take-cover warning covers home, the app transforms — full-screen countdown, the storm's arrival estimate, and the shelter checklist. One button back to the radar. On by default; opt out in Settings.
• Radar suite upgrade: velocity rebuilt on NOAA's per-site super-res feed, plus two new nearest-radar layers — "What's falling" (rain/hail/snow/ice) and "Storm total rain".
• Radar tutor: hover the legend's color ramp to learn what each shade means — "40 dBZ: heavy rain, small hail possible in storms."
• Fix: map sprite assets now load through a CORS-safe path, so icons render correctly and a slow sprite can no longer stall the map at startup.

0.20.1

July 10, 2026

• Self-hosted basemap: the map now draws from FrankWeather's own vector tile archive (Protomaps / OpenStreetMap data, hosted on frankweather.com) — crisper labels, no third-party tile service, no usage terms to outgrow. If our host is ever unreachable the map automatically falls back to the previous tiles.
• Safe mode: if the app fails to start several times in a row, the next launch comes up with optional map layers off (warnings and radar stay on) so a bad setting can never keep the app down during a storm. Self-heals on the next healthy run.

0.20.0

July 10, 2026

• Time-to-impact: when a warned storm is tracking toward your home, the safety strip, the inbound notification, and the spoken alert now say where it is and when it could arrive — "~12 mi to your SW, could reach you around 5:42 PM (~14 min)."
• Live expiry countdown: the safety strip shows a ticking "expires in 23m" chip for the warning driving it — minute 2 and minute 40 of a warning are very different situations.
• New — Alert log: Help → Alert log lists every notification decision the app made, including the ones it suppressed and why (quiet hours, category mute, location mute). "Why didn't it wake me?" now has an inspectable answer. Kept only on your device.
• New — Ctrl+K command palette: one fuzzy search to jump to any saved location, toggle any map layer, or run any action (test alarm, settings, report a problem…).
• New — Protection setup: Settings → Protection setup shows all 8 safety layers with a score, what each does, and one-click enable — so the safety features actually get turned on.
• Outlook upgrade chip: when the Storm Prediction Center raises today's outlook over your home mid-day, a chip appears on the safety strip alongside the notification.
• Notifications now open the app: clicking an alert toast brings FrankWeather to the front — no hunting for the tray icon during a warning.
• Report a problem: one click in Settings → Advanced opens a support email prefilled with a short, PII-free diagnostics summary.
• Accessibility: screen readers hear home risk-level changes announced politely.

0.19.0

July 10, 2026

• Spoken alerts (optional): when a take-cover warning hits home, FrankWeather can SAY it — what, where, and until when — via text-to-speech. Enable it next to the alarm in Settings; Test alarm previews the voice.
• Family watchlist: every saved location is now monitored — a warning covering "Mom's house" notifies you even while you're viewing somewhere else. Mute any location to opt out.
• "What to do right now": every warning's details include a short offline safety checklist for that hazard (tornado sheltering, Turn Around Don't Drown, marine, heat…).
• Escalation awareness: notifications when a watch is UPGRADED to a warning, a warning gains PDS/emergency wording, or the SPC outlook over home is raised.
• Daily briefing (optional): one plain-language morning notification — the day's severe-weather outlook and forecast for Home, at your chosen hour.
• Lightning approaching: a heads-up when strikes show a sustained closing trend on home, before they cross your alarm radius.
• New — Rainfall totals layer: radar-estimated rain that already fell (1 h / 24 h / 48 h, MRMS) for flash-flood context, under Layers → Radar-derived.
• Archive upgrades: the time machine now replays the WARNINGS active at each archived moment (dashed outlines), and Save loop works in Archive mode.
• Learnability & mobility: a first-run guided tour, a plain-language Glossary in Help, and a "Follow me" toggle that keeps alerts and the risk read tracking your live position.

0.18.0

June 24, 2026

• Keyboard & screen-reader accessibility: dialogs now trap and restore focus properly, and the radar-source and Layers menus are fully keyboard-navigable (arrow keys, Home/End, Escape returns to the button).
• Reduced motion respected: with Windows' "show animations" setting off, the wind-flow layer draws its streamlines once and freezes instead of animating continuously.
• Color-blind support: the velocity legend explains how to read inbound/outbound by position (left/right of gray), not just green/red; light-theme risk text darkened for WCAG contrast.
• New — Special Marine Warnings on the map: same severe criteria as a severe thunderstorm (58+ mph gusts, hail, waterspouts), drawn in cyan with an SMW code for anyone on or near the water.
• Storm reports clarified: times labeled CST and counts scoped to SPC's convective day (6 AM–6 AM CT), so overnight reports don't look like "none today."
• Safety outages stay visible: the "warnings or radar feed is down" notice can no longer be dismissed while the outage is ongoing.

0.17.0

June 24, 2026

• FrankWeather is now FREE for everyone. Every feature — HD radar, velocity, lightning, satellite, storm tracking, the radar time machine — with no trial and no license. It's a safety tool, and safety shouldn't be paywalled. Development is supported by donations. (Bought Pro before? Thank you — you funded the work that made this possible.)
• Always-visible safety strip: a persistent plain-language "should I worry?" read for your HOME location at the top of the window — it can't be hidden by panels or map clicks, and turns solid red when it's time to take cover.
• Tornado Emergency / PDS detection: warnings carrying the NWS's escalated wording (TORNADO EMERGENCY, PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION, damage-threat tags) now show a red escalation badge and lead the alert title and risk read.
• Alarm upgrades: a "Test alarm" button in Settings, tornado-class alarms bypass quiet hours and mutes, the alarm re-sounds every 5 minutes while an extreme warning stays over home, and audio is primed at startup so the first alarm always plays.
• Signed updates: releases are now cryptographically signed and the app refuses any installer that isn't verifiably from FrankWeather — plus a strict Content-Security-Policy.
• Nationwide warnings now follow NWS pagination (no dropped polygons during outbreaks); Archive mode shows a clear "not live" badge; new Data sources attribution in About.

0.16.1

June 24, 2026

• Reliability: the 7-day forecast is now normalized by a single shared module used by both the app and its background data layer, so the forecast window can't drift between them. No visible change — groundwork that prevents a class of bugs.

0.16.0

June 24, 2026

• New — Radar archive / time machine (Pro): rewind the radar to any past time. Pick a date & time, then scrub or play the loop forward to replay how a storm unfolded.
• Find it in the radar dropdown as Archive — archived NEXRAD reflectivity (Iowa State's IEM archive), 5-minute frames going back years.
• Playback has a draggable scrubber, play/pause, and a clear timestamp for each frame.

0.15.0

June 24, 2026

• New radar source — Composite (Pro): MRMS column-max reflectivity shows a storm's strongest echo aloft (hail cores, elevated convection), even when the base scan beneath it is weaker.
• Radar picker is now a dropdown: the same Loop / Live HD / Smooth / Velocity modes, plus the new Composite, in a tidy menu instead of a row of buttons.
• Composite uses the standard reflectivity (dBZ) scale, so the existing radar legend applies.

0.14.0

June 24, 2026

• New — switchable GOES satellite channels (Pro): with the Satellite layer on, pick True color, Infrared, or Air mass right under it in the Layers menu.
• Infrared (Band 13) shows cloud-top temperatures, so the tallest, strongest storms and overshooting tops stand out — day or night.
• Air mass (RGB) reveals dry-air intrusions and jet-stream dynamics — the synoptic setup behind developing severe weather — at a glance.
• All three channels stream straight from NASA GIBS GOES-East and refresh with the latest scan.

0.13.0

June 24, 2026

• New — "Should I worry?" banner: a plain-language read of your current risk (take cover / be ready / worth watching / all clear), synthesized from active alerts, the SPC outlook, and any inbound storm.
• New — Simple / Pro mode: a one-click toggle that trims the cockpit to the essentials for everyday use, or restores every tool for power users.
• Plain-language ProbSevere: clicking a storm now explains what the numbers mean ("Rotation flagged — tornado-capable · large hail") instead of just raw values.
• Step through the radar loop frame-by-frame with the ← / → arrow keys; network requests now time out cleanly instead of hanging; warning data kept fresher.

0.12.1

June 24, 2026

• Fixed: the 7-Day Forecast now truly shows 7 days in the installed app (a separate cap in the desktop build was still limiting it to about 4).
• Fixed: the Wind flow layer is now visible in light mode — its particles were washed out against the light map, so the light theme now uses a darker palette.

0.12.0

June 23, 2026

• New — Wind flow (Pro): animated surface-wind streamlines across the map — thousands of particles flowing along the wind and colored by speed, from Open-Meteo's HRRR-class winds. See at a glance where the wind is coming from and how fast. Under Layers → Radar-derived → Wind flow.

0.11.0

June 23, 2026

• New — ProbSevere (Pro): NOAA's machine-learning severe-storm objects on the map, colored by threat. Each storm shows its probability of going severe, tornadic, hail, or damaging wind — and clicking it reveals max hail size (MESH), VIL, and low-level rotation, the attributes the radar mosaics don't carry. Under Layers → Radar-derived → ProbSevere, refreshing every ~2 minutes.

0.10.1

June 23, 2026

• Fixed: the 7-Day Forecast now shows a full 7 days (it was stopping at about 4), redesigned as a clean visual list — one row per day with a weather icon, high/low, and precipitation chance.

0.10.0

June 23, 2026

• New — Velocity radar (Pro): NEXRAD base velocity from the nearest radar. Green is motion toward the radar, red is away — a tight green-next-to-red couplet flags a rotating, possibly tornadic storm.
• Color-blind-safe warnings: every warning now carries a short code (TOR, SVR, FFW…) and a hazard icon in the legend, so a tornado is never told apart from a flood by color alone.
• Reworked legend: moved clear of the radar timeline, always shows the major hazards including tornado, and decodes velocity colors when Velocity is on.
• Keyboard fixes: Esc closes the top dialog; map shortcuts no longer fire while a dialog is open.

0.9.11

June 23, 2026

• Fixed for good: the recurring “FrankWeather cannot be closed” error during updates is resolved. The upgrade step that removes the previous version now uses a reliable removal method, verified end-to-end on the upgrade path.

0.9.9

June 23, 2026

• Fixed: installing an update from inside the app could close FrankWeather without the installer ever appearing. Updates now hand off to the installer cleanly and complete on their own.

0.9.8

June 23, 2026

• Update reliability: the updater now always closes the running app — including the background tray process — before installing, so upgrades no longer stall on “FrankWeather cannot be closed.”

0.9.7

June 17, 2026

• Fixed for real: the installer no longer stalls on “FrankWeather cannot be closed” during an update — it now reliably closes the running app (including the tray process) before installing.

0.9.6

June 17, 2026

• Safety: every warning type now ranks and draws correctly — hurricane, storm surge, snow squall, high wind and more no longer slip behind lesser alerts, and tornado/emergency warnings can never be silenced by a per-category mute.
• More dependable warnings — a brief data hiccup no longer hides a warning's area, and live-alert data is kept fresher.
• New on-map legend — decode radar intensity (dBZ) and the active warning colors at a glance.
• New layers: Echo tops (storm-top height) and Precipitation type (rain/snow/ice), from NOAA MRMS.

0.9.5

June 17, 2026

• Fixed: warnings now take precedence over watches. Hovering or clicking where a warning overlaps a watch now shows the warning first (and a tornado warning outranks a lesser one).

0.9.4

June 17, 2026

• Fixed: updates could fail with a “FrankWeather cannot be closed” error when the app was running in the system tray. Updates now close the app cleanly and install reliably.
• Missed a few updates? You now jump straight to the newest version in a single install.

0.9.3

June 17, 2026

• Important fix: tornado warnings now stand out in bright red and always draw on top — previously they could blend into, or sit behind, severe thunderstorm warnings of a similar color.
• Warnings are now color-coded by type (tornado, severe storm, flood, winter, fire, heat, tropical) so each is easy to tell apart at a glance.

0.9.2

June 15, 2026

• Sharper radar. A higher-resolution animated loop and crisper Live HD when you zoom into a storm.
• New "Smooth" radar mode — NOAA's seamless mosaic that stays clean all the way to street level.
• New Surface wind layer. Direction-and-speed arrows at nearby stations, in the Layers menu.

0.9.1

June 14, 2026

• Added Privacy, Terms, and License links in the app's About panel.
• A gentle, dismissible reminder in the last few days of your trial.

0.9.0

June 14, 2026

• Track a storm cell. Click a cell, click the way it's heading, and see a forward cone, the towns in its path, and an ETA to each.
• A speed slider re-times every ETA instantly. A straight-line guide, not an official forecast.

0.8.3

June 14, 2026

• Hover tooltips. Mouse over a watch, warning, station, or storm for a quick summary — clicking still opens full details. Turn it off in Settings.
• Calmer data banner. Only shows for genuinely stale data now, with a live age plus Refresh and dismiss.
• Tidied up the About button in the top-left.

0.8.2

June 14, 2026

• About panel. Click the FrankWeather logo (top-left) for contact info, the full changelog, and version details.
• A refreshed frankweather.com with this public changelog, kept in step with each release.

0.8.1

June 14, 2026

• One-click updates. Download now verifies and launches the installer automatically — no second step.
• Cleaner toolbar. A new Layers menu groups every map layer in one tidy place; Radar, Lightning, and Warnings stay as quick buttons.
• Adjustable lightning-nearby radius with quick presets (5–25 miles).
• Sharper map on high-resolution displays, plus a Settings layout fix.

0.8.0

June 14, 2026

• Tropical tracking. Live hurricanes & tropical storms from the National Hurricane Center, category-colored on the map.
• More hazard layers. Recent earthquakes (USGS), active wildfires (NIFC), and the US Drought Monitor.
• Pop-out mini radar. An always-on-top radar window centered on your home.
• Smarter alerts. A distinct alarm tone per hazard, a lightning-near-home alarm, and per-hazard notification rules.

0.7.0

June 14, 2026

• A What's New summary after each update, and a welcome on first launch.
• An About & Support panel with version, privacy, and contact details.
• Quick "Get Pro" links to start a license.

0.6.0 – 0.6.3

June 13, 2026

• Licensing & trials. A 14-day free trial of every feature, then a Pro license for up to 3 devices.
• A 3-day offline grace period so Pro keeps working through brief outages.
• Overlapping watches & warnings now show as one clean, sorted list.
• Restored the system tray, notifications, and in-app updates, and fixed license activation.

0.5.0

June 13, 2026

• A tabbed, customizable sidebar (Now / Forecast / Data) and an at-a-glance dashboard.
• Weather condition icons, a hero current-conditions block, feels-like, sunset countdown, and nearest-lightning readouts.

0.3.0 – 0.4.0

June 13, 2026

• Air quality, river/flood gauges, space-weather/aurora, county boundaries, and an alert-history timeline.
• Storm-motion vectors, inbound-storm ETA notifications, a richer SPC outlook and mesoscale-discussion panel, and a tray icon that changes color with the threat.
• 7-day forecast, an interactive hourly graph, and radar snapshot/loop export.

0.2.0

June 13, 2026

• Range rings, a sun & moon panel, an hourly graph, keyboard shortcuts, an audible severe-weather alarm, and a responsive layout.

0.1.0

June 2026

• First release: live radar, NWS watches & warnings, lightning, satellite, forecasts, saved locations, and automatic updates.