Braided
Braided
One map, thousands of places, and a card for any of them — the river, the hut, the beach, the tide, today's fire season, the week ahead. The rivers are lit by what they're doing right now, against their own record and never a national scale.
Free. No account. Works with no signal.
The live files can't be reached from here right now, so every river is drawn as unmeasured. Nothing on this page is a remembered reading.
Hover a river.Tap a river.
Why this exists
The regional council gauges the river. DOC knows whether the hut is open and whether the track in is closed. LINZ predicts the tide. GeoNet feels the quake. Fire and Emergency set today's fire season. MetService issue the warning. LAWA test the water — and, in 48 sheds, the air.
Every one of those is public. You have already paid for all of it. And none of it is published in the same place, in the same shape, or on the same map — so a question as ordinary as is it safe to cross? becomes nine browser tabs, two of which are PDFs, none of which has any idea where you are standing.
Braided is the braid. Thirty public sources go in. One card comes out, about the place you're standing in.
How it works
Everywhere else, finding this out starts with knowing which website holds the answer — the council for the river, DOC for the hut, LINZ for the tide. Braided starts from where you're going instead. Tap a bend in a river, a road end, a beach, a hut, and one card comes up with everything we hold about there — nearest first, with the distance on it.
Four real places, read out of the live files a moment ago. Not mock-ups — and the rules that pick them are in the open.
The live files can't be reached from here, so the card that would normally sit here — a real river gauge, a real hut, a real beach, read a moment ago — has nothing to read. It is not a screenshot, so there is nothing to fall back to.
Every number in context
Somewhere in the country right now, two gauges are reading almost exactly the same flow. They are not having the same day. The number is identical and it means opposite things — which is why a reading on its own is a trivia answer rather than an answer, and why Braided never shows you one.
Offline
Pick the region you're driving to and take it with you: the topo map, the terrain, every gauge, hut, campsite and swim spot inside it, the forecasts and the photos. On the phone, in one download, before you lose signal.
The app was never going to phone an agency anyway — it reads files published ahead of time — so offline isn't a mode, it's the same code path with the network switched off. No spinner in the middle of a valley. What you carried in is what you have.
More of this country has no coverage than has it. An app that needs a connection to tell you about a river is an app for the car park.
No subscription, no paid tier, no advertising, no account, and nothing that follows you between apps. iPhone and Android.
Built with in Ōtautahi Christchurch. You can help cover what it costs to run.