Blog › 1 September 2026
Version 2 on the Mac
Tuesday 1 September 2026 — London Kitesurfers — by Alan Jay
Version 2.1 of the London Kitesurfers app is on the Mac App Store. It is a free update, and if you have the app on your iPhone or iPad you already own it.
The last version we actually released was 1.7.6, so the Mac arrives carrying 1.8, 1.9, 2.0 and this week’s 2.1 all at once.
All of version 2’s headline is here on the Mac: custom spots anywhere in the world, community sharing, collaborative edits, and Windguru Standard and Pro. Spots, sessions and trips sync across iPhone, iPad and Mac over iCloud. The version 2 release post went through all of that feature by feature five days ago, and I am not going to repeat it.
What is worth writing about is why you would open it on a Mac at all. The honest answer is not “it has the same features”. It is that a few of the things this app does are genuinely cramped on a phone, and a big screen and a keyboard fix them.
Planning a trip without tapping between six screens
On the Mac the app is a split view. A sidebar down the left — Map, Live wind, Sessions, Session Map, Who’s Going, Trips, Forecast Accuracy — and whatever you pick opens in the detail column next to the map rather than as a sheet thrown over the top of it. Where you left the sidebar is remembered, so the app reopens on the section you were actually using.
That matters most for trips. Planning one means going back and forth between the spot picker, the forecast for each candidate, the tide window and what the models are arguing about — and on a Mac you can have the map and the trip open at once instead of holding the last screen in your head.
Trips can go to LKSA spots or to your own spots anywhere in the world, and the picker sorts either best-for-the-day or nearest to you. Travel mode works on the Mac too: one switch in Settings and the map opens on where you are, community spots near you are shown, and the London alerts go quiet.
The macOS spot page was reworked along the way, and — a small thing that was a daily irritation — it now scrolls properly.
Six model lines at once, which is the whole point of drawing six
Every spot, LKSA or community, carries the multi-model forecast: five global weather models plus MET Norway, with the LKSA weighted line drawn alongside them. Two days under the hourly slider, seven days on the full page, and the embedded Windguru forecast underneath.
This is the feature that most rewards a large window. The value is not the extra lines, it is reading how much the models agree, and six series squeezed into a phone’s width is a smudge. Give it half a 27-inch display and the disagreement is obvious at a glance.
Version 2.1 adds the other half of that honesty: a How sure is this? section on every spot, with the Met Office ensemble’s chance-of-wind chart for the next 54 hours and straight probabilities for 12, 15, 18, 22 and 28 kt+. The 2.1 announcement goes through it properly — on a Mac-sized window the ensemble band is even easier to read than the model lines.
Live Wind is on the Mac as well — what the anemometers near a spot are actually reporting, each reading labelled with the station, its distance and how old it is. These are recent observations collected on a schedule, not a feed from the beach, and a station a few miles inland at a different exposure is guidance rather than gospel.
Two Mac fixes landed in 2.0.1 specifically. The live-vs-forecast graph now covers the whole day — a 5am to 10pm baseline that stretches to dawn and dusk when the day is longer — rather than a window that rolled the morning off by teatime. And every caveat on the Mac’s live-wind pages now wraps fully instead of truncating, which was the exact opposite of what a page full of honest hedging is for.
There is also a Forecast Accuracy section, and on the Mac it is a sortable table of every spot: average error in knots, bias, hit rate, click a column to re-sort. The iPhone gets a compact list, because a table on a phone collapses into one column and stops being a table.
A season of sessions in one sitting
The session log is the other thing that changes character on a bigger screen. Going through a year of sessions on a phone is a scroll; on a Mac it is a sitting.
Session analysis on every GPS session: runs, tacks and gybes drawn on the map, top speeds, planing time, gybe efficiency and a wind estimate derived from the GPS alone. Any session can be shared as an image.
Insights: season totals, personal-best trends, a wind-band breakdown, your most-ridden spots, and the countries and continents you have ridden in.
A pop-out session map — macOS only. Pull one session’s track into its own freely resizable window. It is keyed to the session, so window restoration reopens the right one after a relaunch.
Storage compaction: tracks and photos are now stored about 85% smaller, and a one-tap Compact Storage in Settings ▸ Diagnostics shrinks an existing log on the device and in iCloud.
Sessions arrive on the Mac by GPX import — Woo, Surfr, Zef, Hoolan, Garmin, Strava and most other things — or by syncing across from your phone. Settings shows the last iCloud upload and download too, with any error spelled out, because a silent sync failure is the sort of thing you otherwise discover when a session is missing.
Building out a spot for a trip abroad
Adding a spot is the job I would now rather do on a Mac than anywhere else. The pin map is a full-size sheet rather than a panel on a phone, and the parts of a spot genuinely worth filling in — which wind directions work, the tide state, hazards, parking, launch notes — are all typing, which is to say all keyboard.
Mark a spot Private and it collects nothing. Mark it Shared and it starts filling with data: a seven-day multi-model wind forecast, tide predictions where the model covers them, and readings from nearby weather stations. That collection takes a few hours to get going — up to about twelve in the worst case — so a spot you add this evening will have something to show you tomorrow, not immediately.
Shared spots render their data view in a Mac web view, with the chart, the tides and the nearby stations inline. They are also collaborative: suggest an edit to someone else’s spot and safe additions apply straight away, bigger changes queue for whoever created it, and every spot carries a version, an “added by” credit and a history the creator can roll back.
There is AI spot research for filling in a beach you rode once three summers ago, and Wind History for every spot now reaches all the way to today.
Windguru is built in here the same as everywhere else. Search Windguru in-app and it picks up the spot ID; Standard is the free public forecast, and with a PRO account you sign in once in Settings — a normal windguru.cz login in a Mac web view — for your premium models and extended range on the spot page. The session stays on your device; LKSA never sees the credentials.
Mac things that are actually Mac things
A native Settings window on ⌘,, not a popover borrowed from the phone.
File ▸ New Trip (⌘N) and Import GPX… (⌘I).
A Go menu: Sessions ⌘1, Session Map ⌘2, Who’s Going ⌘3, Trips ⌘4, and Refresh Conditions ⌘R.
View ▸ Toggle Sidebar (⌃⌘S), and Window ▸ LKSA Map (⇧⌘0) to bring the map back if you have closed every window.
One preference worth knowing about wherever you use it: Show full day’s wind on spot pages in Settings ▸ Data, for when you want the whole day rather than the riding window.
What is not on the Mac
Three things are iPhone-only, for platform reasons rather than choice: Live Activities, Apple Health import, and the Apple Watch companion. GPX import and iCloud sync both work fine on the Mac, and heart rate does appear on Mac sessions — it comes across already attached to sessions your iPhone imported from Health.
Everything the app asks for on the Mac is opt-in: Location (it centres “add spot” on you), Calendars and your Photo library (its own events, and photos on sessions, trips and spots), and Notifications for forecast alerts. Decline any of them and the rest of the app carries on.
And the usual promises, unchanged: no LKSA account, no LKSA login, no ads, no tracking. Your spots, sessions and trips live on your own devices.
Getting it
It is a free update on the Mac App Store — one app for iPhone, iPad and Mac.
If something looks wrong on the Mac specifically, or a spot you added has not picked up data, say so in the usual WhatsApp channels. Mac bugs get reported far less often than phone bugs, which is not the same as there being fewer of them.
See you on the beach.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, with model data from the Met Office, ECMWF, NOAA, DWD, Météo-France and MET Norway. Forecasts and live readings are guidance — conditions on the water are yours to judge.