Braided
Braided
One map, thousands of places, and a card for any of them: the river, the hut, the track, the beach, the tide, today's fire season, the week ahead. Each river is coloured by how high it is right now for that river.
Free. No account. Works with no signal.
We can't load today's readings right now, so every river is drawn grey.
Hover a river.Tap a river.
Why this exists
The regional council gauges the river. DOC knows whether the hut is open, where the track goes and whether it 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 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. 34 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 track, a beach, a hut, and one card comes up with everything we hold about there, nearest first, with the distance on it. For most huts and campsites that take bookings, the card also shows which nights have room for your group, checked live with DOC.
Real places, as they are right now. How we pick them.
We can't load today's readings right now. This spot normally shows a real river, hut and beach as they are right now.
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, so Braided never shows a reading on its own.
When you're not looking
Ask Braided to watch a river and it tells you when it's unusually high or low for that river. Pick an alert to see when it would go off, and what arrives on your phone.
No alert has ever meant a river is safe to cross. It can be late, and it can never arrive: the gauge has to report, our servers have to pick it up, and Apple or Google have to reach your phone. It is a nudge to go and look.
And one for the sky
Further than the map says. The aurora circles the magnetic pole, not the South Pole, and that puts Aotearoa further from it than it looks. So each place needs a different strength of storm. Drag the storm and watch it come up the country.
Pick a place in the app and it tells you how strong a storm that place needs before you save the alert, so you know if it will hardly ever go off. Two things this picture can't show you. Midsummer has the least darkness: Rakiura gets about two and a quarter hours of it in December against nearly twelve in June. And the best displays often come late at night with about an hour's warning, too late for an evening forecast. The limits are written out in full.
Offline
Pick the region you're driving to and take it with you: the topo map, the terrain, every gauge, hut, campsite, track and swim spot inside it, the forecasts and the hut photos. On the phone, in one download, before you lose signal.
Almost everything the app shows is data we've already prepared. So offline works exactly like online, just without the updates. No spinner in the middle of a valley. What you carried in is what you have. The one exception is a hut's booking calendar: which nights have room is checked live with DOC as you pick your dates, so that part needs signal.
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. In your browser now; iPhone and Android to come.
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