How to use Dealate

The top of the forecast is a photograph of the sky at the time of day you are looking at, with the day's answer written across it: one word on a five-step scale from very low to very high, and a line under it telling you what to do about it. Beneath that sits a scale showing where the day falls and how confident we are. It is a likelihood rather than a promise, so a high band is a good reason to spend the evening outside, not a booking.

Under the band sits one bar per hour of the day, with the best stretch of hours called out above it and drawn at full strength while the rest are dimmed. A line marks the current hour. Flights are short, usually a few hours rather than the whole day, so the window is the part worth planning around.

The four chips under the hourly bars split the day into parts, each carrying its own band word and colour. Picking one moves the whole screen to that part of the day: the sky photograph, the answer at the top, the species odds and the conditions all change with it. It is how you check whether tonight is better than this afternoon without waiting for the day to pass.

The conditions strip sorts the weather into what is helping and what is holding back, each condition with the value it was measured at: temperature in whichever units you picked in Settings, humidity, recent rain, and wind. Tap All conditions and it opens into every condition we evaluated, each with a bar leaning left or right from a centre line by how much it counted. If the band disagrees with what you can see out of the window, this is where you find out which condition is behind it. Note that the number on the forecast card and the colour on the map answer slightly different questions, since the card is your exact spot and the map cell covers everything around it.

The 7-day outlook gives each day a column on the same colour scale as the band above, so you can tell at a glance whether today is the peak or whether Thursday looks better. The best day of the week is captioned Best. The columns are also the day selector: tap one and the whole screen switches to that day. It moves as the weather forecast moves, and the days furthest out move most.

A free account shows today's flight-chance band for your saved location. Pointing the forecast at your GPS position or any place you search, the best window, the 7-day outlook, the live map, and alerts are part of Pro, and every recurring plan starts with a 7-day free trial.

The species list ranks the ants recorded around you by their own odds today, each with its own band, because the same weather that suits one species leaves another underground. Scientific names lead, with the common name underneath where the species has one.

Tap a row and it expands in place. You get the queen: how big she is, what she looks like, and photographs of a real specimen where we have them, plus the nest habitat the species is usually found in and what people nearby have actually reported. That is the identification help you want in your hand at 8pm with something large and winged on the path.

The controls above the list narrow it: search by name, show only high-likelihood species, or filter by how hard a species is to find, whether it flies by day or at night, and the habitat it nests in. Sort by likelihood or alphabetically. The filters are a way to cut a long list down to the handful you would actually go looking for.

The star on a species row saves it. Favorites are what the app treats as yours: they get their own screen, they can be used to filter the map, and they are the species that email alerts watch for. You need an account to save them, since they follow you between devices rather than living on one phone.

The map is tiled with hexagons, each covering a patch of ground a few kilometres across, and each coloured by the flight chance inside it on the same scale as the forecast band: cold greys and blues are quiet, gold through red is worth going outside for. Colour is not the only channel. The higher the band, the thicker and more solid the cell's outline, so the map still ranks itself for anyone who cannot separate those hues.

Drag to pan and pinch or scroll to zoom. Cells are recomputed for wherever you land, so a fresh part of the country takes a moment to fill in and you will see it counting the areas it is working through. Zooming out far enough gives you the shape of a whole region at once.

Tapping a hexagon opens a small card for it: the band, the same one-line verdict the forecast screen gives, the time of day worth being there, and the genera driving it. It is the forecast screen's answer for a place you are not standing in, which makes it the quickest way to compare two spots before deciding where to go. The species-by-species breakdown inside that card is part of Pro.

A hexagon ringed in a purple dashed outline means somebody reported seeing a flight there. Those rings are a separate layer drawn over the forecast, so the ring tells you what people saw and the fill underneath still tells you what the weather suggests. The shade of purple carries the status: a deeper violet is a sighting we have verified, a lighter one is still pending review. Tap the cell to read the sightings themselves.

The genus chip above the map narrows it to one genus, or to My favorites, which uses the species you have starred. On a map where dozens of species are pooled into every cell, that is how you get an answer about the ant you actually care about rather than the loudest one. The panel headed Flight conditions maps each colour back to its band, and has its own Observations section for the sighting rings.

The report button records a flight you witnessed: the species if you know it, where, and when. You can drop the pin somewhere other than your current position, which matters when you get home before you get around to logging it. Reports are the citizen-science side of the app and they are what a public accuracy record will eventually be built from.

The report form asks what the ants were flying over: paving, grass, woodland, and so on. Not sure is the first option and it is a perfectly good answer. The habitat is there to build a picture of where each species is really found, which feeds the species pages rather than the score on your forecast.

When enough sightings pile up near you in the same part of the day, the forecast says so directly with a line reading that sightings boosted or reduced it, and you can open that line to read the evidence behind it. Below that threshold nothing moves, which is deliberate: one report on its own is not evidence of a pattern.

Every report you file lands in My Journal, your own record across devices, with a season recap on top. Entries group under the night they happened, and each one carries your photo, the species and how big the flight was, whether it is still pending or confirmed, how long ago it was, and the habitat you picked. A line reading corroborated by known records means your sighting lines up with what has been recorded for that species. You can correct a report while it is still pending, retract one at any point, and export the whole log as CSV or JSON to keep or to analyse elsewhere.

Alerts tell you when the odds are worth acting on instead of asking you to remember to check. Species alerts arrive by email when a species you have favorited is likely to fly near your saved location, which works on any device even with the app closed. The email names your area and lists each species with its own percentage for the day, so you can tell a promising morning from a certain one without opening anything. On-device alerts are a separate switch with its own threshold you can set.

Settings holds temperature and wind units, light or dark appearance, and both alert switches. Your saved home location is the place a free account's band and your email alerts refer to, so it is worth getting right. It is deliberately not editable in the app; write to support and we will move it.

The blog is where the reasoning that does not fit in a forecast goes: why a box and your own garden can disagree, what the research actually says about flight triggers, and what we changed and why. It reads fine without an account.

Help holds the short answers to the questions people ask most, and the tour is always there to replay from the same card. If none of it covers your problem, the support address on every page reaches a person.