Hey All. I wrote another web app for sugarin this year that I want to share with you.

Some of you used my web app last year that calculates the temperature when your sap becomes maple syrup based on local barometric pressure, using your mobile devices gps location and a realtime weather lookup. That app still exists with some upgrades and now I made another. Both still free to use.

The new web app is for logging how your sap is flowing and sharing it on a google map. When ever I look at the tapping updates threads here at mapletrader.com I always think how cool it would be to see what people are saying about how their flow is on a map. So I wrote that. I tried to make it simple to use so that people will want to participate. The first time you log in just create a profile for your sugar bush, then in the future you just log how many gallons or liters you collected since the previous collection. Then I make some calculations about volume per tap and plot it on a map.

I used Googles heatmap technology which I think will display the data nicely. This type of mapping is used with scientific data to display things like population density or seismic activity. Of course as I write this message the map is blank. Until somebody starts collecting sap and logging it nothing will show up. Still about a month away from when I normally tap in Northern Michigan so I haven’t posted any logs yet myself. Meanwhile I hope some of you south of me will want to participate.

You will not find this in your app store. You don’t download anything. These are web apps. They work like any website on your computer but are designed to look good on your mobile devices and take advantage of the GPS capabilities. I may need to make adjustments to the map colors and radius etc once we get some real data, we’ll see. So here it is same address as last years app...

https://www.saptapapps.com

Besides just plotting on the map I’m also collecting the current weather data from the National Weather Service about the closest observations to the location of your sugar bush for the time frame of each log entry. It’s my plan in the future to do some analysis of this data to share back on the site. We’ve got plenty of old school, hand me down knowledge about what makes the sap run and averages per tap per tree, not to mention plenty of university studies that are made available to the public. But I also thought it would be modern to crowd source some data collection and make my own analysis from collections provided by both commercial and hobby producers here too.

I hope no one thinks this is commercial spam. I’m not charging to use the apps. I simply wrote them because I wanted to be able to use them myself and I’m just offering to share. I’m going to post a link to this message in the tapping update of my own home state of Michigan. I don’t want to spam all the thread so if anyone is interested in getting people from your state to participate too, consider sharing a link to this thread in your states tapping update.

I’ll keep an eye on this thread for any questions or pm me. The web apps also have a contact form I’ll monitor. Thanks for your consideration.