[Problem]
Most tide apps hand you the nearest harbor or buoy — often miles from the beach you actually care about. A headland, a bay, or a shallow reef shifts the timing and height enough to turn a good harvest window into a soaked afternoon, and there was nowhere to record what the water really did at your spot.
[Approach]
- 01Started from official NOAA station data, then let people drop pins at the exact beach, cove, or harvest spot and tune the curve with local offsets and observations.
- 02Built activity windows — low-tide exploring, seaweed harvest, surf, snorkel — that shade the tide curve so the right window is obvious at a glance.
- 03Added Field Notes for citizen-science logging: a photo of the water line against a known reference becomes a ground-truth data point.
- 04Scored every beach by its distance to the nearest official station, producing a coverage-gap map showing where a new sensor or volunteer logger would help most.
- 05Shipped it map-first and installable, with the map opening at your location and a bottom nav sized for one wet hand.
[Outcome]
A working tide explorer in beta at tideex.lovable.app covering coastal Washington, Oregon, and California — free, ad-free, and open to anyone who wants to add what they know about their own beach.
