Hi All,
Release 1.5.3 should be hitting the App Store shortly.
There are a few significant changes for voiceover:
1. Daily summaries for day / night are now available for each of the day menu buttons. As you swipe along the day menu, voiceover will announce a summary.
2. Enhanced summaries for widget, notifications and Apple Watch. Voiceover should now speak the summary in a more natural way, expanding cardinal points and temperatures. Please let us know if you find anything that isn't quite working.
3. The pressure values for days 3 - 7 in the air god timeline have been fixed for anyone who is using US / imperial settings.
As ever, if you are enjoying your time with Weather Gods then we would love a review or rating on the app store please (direct link in our app settings). This helps with our search ranking and improve sales, helping us with our data costs so we can keep the lights shining bright on the weather gods :)
Also, it goes without saying, if you have any problems with the app, including accuracy of data, then don't hesitate to get in touch as it can help us to improve the app for everybody.
Have a great day everyone!
Scott
Comments
Ideas for the Apple Watch app
Hi Stefan,
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.
1. Agreed, it's on my list - hoping to improve in the 1.6 release.
2. We have the daily summary for the current day on the watch, I assume you mean for the seven days? I can do this, but it would slow down the loading of weather data due to having to request 7 days of data.
3. I did try adding the sounds to the watch but unfortunately there is a 5 MB limit on watch assets, including sounds. I might come back to this and explore the possibility of downloading over the net.
Regards
Scott
Re: Ideas for the Apple Watch app
High and thank you for the fast response! Yes I talked for the 7 day summaries. I accept your argument for the increasing of loading time. About the sounds, it will be nice, but not so important for me.
Regards,
Stefan
New to this app
I just purchased Weather Gods yesterday, after repeated frustration with Dark Sky not working as expected. So far I am liking the app, but I have a few questions about it. Sorry if I am repeating other questions from the past.
1. How exactly do notifications about rain and snow work? Dark Sky, when it works, gives a notification within a few minutes of precipitation beginning and another when it is about to end. Does Weather Gods work the same way?
2. Are notifications sent for my current location, or just for a saved favorite? One thing I really liked about Dark Sky was its ability to notify based on my exact location, even if I am traveling across town.
3. Do you plan on supporting severe weather alerts from NOAA in the future? I am assuming you donât currently because there was no indication of it in the notification settings.
I also noticed a couple of oddities with the Today view widget:
1. When the widget is expanded to show more detail, I see the following bit of text: âNow, Scattered cloudswind from the South West, 4 miles per hour, light breeze (wind from the South West)no gustsrain unlikely.â Notice that the wind speed appears twice, and there is also missing spaces in the text which causes the VoiceOver pronunciation to be a bit off.
2. Once VoiceOver is focused within the Weather Gods widget, I have to use touch navigation to get out of the widget. Attempting to swipe to another widget doesnât work, and I cannot use a three-finger swipe to leave the Today view. This is on an iPad Mini 4 running the latest version of iOS 11. Itâs possible this may be an iOS bug, but Weather Gods is the only widget I have that is doing this.
I can very easily see why Weather Gods has become so popular here at AppleVis. Iâm not yet fully sold on the app, but it does look promising. I will certainly look forward to what you have planned for future releases of the app.
New to this app
Hi dvdmth,
Thanks for purchasing the app and welcome to Weather Gods!
To answer your questions:
1. We notify about 15 minutes before the event for any live notifications such as rain, snow, ice, fog etc. We don't notify when it will end, but we indicate the length of time in a more conversational manner e.g. 'for the rest of the afternoon', 'most of the evening'. We also only check once an hour so we wont do the minute by minute notifications.
2. Notifications are currently just for saved favourites, but we are working on notifications for current location when follow me is switched on.
3. Correct, we don't currently push out severe weather alerts, but we are currently working on this - it's challenging because our app is an international app and the weather alerts vary from country to country. We are also localised for languages other than English, so we've got that to consider as well.
Widget oddities
1. Sounds like a bug, I've raised a ticket for this in our bug tracker.
2. I will investigate further, although we don't do anything different to other widgets.
Thanks for the feedback
Regards
Scott
Which is right?
When I launch the Weather Gods app looking at the daily summary for the next week here in Tredegar Sowth Wales I see that most nights are forecast to be frosty. However, if I activate the Ice God it tells me that for each night snow and frost are unlikely. Why is this? I know which is right, it is cold up here in the valleys!
Fantastic app though well thought out and accurate. Thanks and well done! What about a white Christmas?
Which is right?
Hi Malcolm,
Glad you like the app :)
There is a bug with the frost calculations in the current release for the Ice God timeline - they are too aggressive and are really only predicting a very hard frost.
However, the daily summaries are pretty good at the moment and I also recently updated the frost notification to use our new calculation coming in the next release.
For now, you can safely ignore the Ice God and rely on the daily summaries and notifications. Although, I'm always tweaking the calculation, trying to get a good fit.
I'm also in the UK, so would also love a white christmas. My day job is working for the Met Office as a software developer. I keep my ear to the ground, but haven't head any indications on a white christmas yet.
Fingers crossed!
Thanks for responding
Thanks for responding to my questions. The notifications are the main feature I am interested in, so anything you can do to enhance them will be appreciated.
You mentioned that, for rain events, you only check once per hour to see when precipitation is expected. That will not be sufficient here in Colorado, where storm conditions can change rapidly without warning. If you can only check for rain on an hourly basis, then some storms will be missed altogether.
As an example, I have on multiple occasions encountered a scenario like this. At 4:00 PM Dark Sky reports that it will be clear for the hour. By 4:10 PM the forecast changes to indicate that it will rain lightly within 45 minutes. By 4:15 that forecast changes again to rain starting in 15 minutes. By 4:20 an alert is sent to my device indicating heavy rain for the hour. Within a few minutes the skies open up and it starts raining cats and dogs. By 4:30 thereâs even some small hail mixed in. Then, by 4:45 the storm dissipates as quickly as it developed, and by 5:00 PM you would have no idea there was any precipitation at all, except for the wet ground.
That is Colorado weather for you, and itâs one reason why Dark Sky quickly became a favorite app of mine a couple of years ago. It wasnât perfect, but it generally gave me the notifications I needed for rainfall. Alas, the app has been giving me fits over the last few months, which only became worse after updating to iOS 11. It is now giving me notifications for rainfall when it is sunny outside, and the app itself reports no precipitation anywhere in the area. The daily summary notifications have almost completely disappeared, and the Today widget has more than once gotten stuck, not updating until I restarted my iPad (even closing and relaunching the app didnât work to fix the issue). This is why Iâm looking for alternatives.
I have to say that I really like the daily summaries Weather Gods provides. They are more detailed than what Dark Sky gives, and I can even adjust the time they arrive, whereas Dark Sky only delivers them at 7:00 AM, with no option to change that.
Colorado weather!
Unfortunately Weather Gods can't (yet) provide that level of notification cover. We can get the data, but costs are prohibitive for us at the moment.
It would be interesting to see how our app fairs generally with the rain notifications, you wont get the level of granularity for changes in the hour, but there might be enough information for the hours ahead to be useful in determining next course of action?
Wind Chill?
Hello,
I'm a new user of Weather Gods so please forgive me if this question has already been dealt with before.
Is there a way to have wind chill reported as a part of the weather summary? For us folks who live in colder climates this can be quite an important piece of information.
Thanks in advance.
Rain notifications
Thanks again for the quick reply. Regarding how accurate the rain notifications will actually be, I probably wonât be able to answer that question until next summer. The scenario I depicted generally only happens during the summer months, starting at around May or June and continuing until early September. We also have dramatic weather shifts in the winter, but those shifts are more long-term, spanning hours instead of minutes, so the issue wonât be prevalent for me until a half year from now. So, I really cannot evaluate the reliability of this app until then, at least as far as rain events are concerned.
Wind Chill?
Hi Frank,
Unfortunately not as part of the daily summary.
However, wind chill (feels like temperature) is available in other parts of the app - you just need to switch on in settings and wherever the temperature is announced, you will also hear the feels like temperature.
We also have a freeze notification which reports wind chill as well (if any) - might be of some use?
Rain notifications
Thanks for the info on the rain, hopefully you will still be using Weather Gods when the summer comes around :)
Re: wind Chill
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the solution. I missed that setting. Everything is working very well now.
High temperature in evening
I opened the Weather Gods app last night at around 8 PM or so. On the main screen, where the fire god was, the app indicated the current temperature to be 39 degrees, then gave a high of 39 and a low of 31. So the high listed was the same as the current temp, while the actual high for the day was some 20 degrees warmer.
I would suggest updating the behavior of the app when accessed late in the day, so that either the high temperature is omitted or the high is changed to reflect the actual observed high for the day. Giving a high that matches the current temperature does not make sense in this context.
High temperature in evening
Thanks for the feedback on the high temperature, yes, you are quite correct, it feels like a bug. We have already implemented a fix on the Apple watch to omit the high temperature in these circumstances and I will be applying the same logic to the next app release.
Location
I live on the north side of Chicago, near Wrigley Field. Weather Gods has more than a million locations, including Wrigley field. It also has churches, schools, police stations, and neighborhood names. Any of these can be selected as a favorite as well as Chicago. If the follow me forecast is turned off in settings, the default location for forecast and current conditions is the first location listed in favorites. For people in Chicago and big cities it does not make much difference. Weather gods has not purchased the hyperlocal forecast and current condition data found on the Weather Underground. WU provides forecasts for a four kilometer radius of a location and has many thousands of personal weather stations. Instead, Weather Gods provides the NWS forecast for the county and the nearest airport temperature and weather condition data. Even if WG says Evanston or in my instance Lincolnwood, or some other place in the area, the current condition data and forecast will be the same. I know because I put different locations around Chicago and compared the forecast and current condition data. This may change of course if the WG crew decides to go with the higher priced data package and receive more frequent updates and localized data. For me, I have Chicago selected as my first favorite because I feel connected to my city and not that of the baseball stadium I live near. For the record, I fly the Chicago flag outside my house, not the W flag. It is all the same information.
Location
Hi Kelly,
Interesting analysis there ... agreed on the weather stations for current conditions, WU personal weather station network is not currently available to us ... but now they are part of IBM ... maybe one day
With regards to the forecast locations, we use IBM Weather Company data APIs and they claim to offer 2.2 billion location accurate forecasts, hence the reason we have such a large location database in Weather Gods. Your results on trying different locations and getting the same weather has prompted me to raise a support call with them, and query the 2.2 billion forecast locations. I will let you know what they say.
I hope to one day add the high granularity forecast model and enable 15 minute updates, unfortunately the cost is prohibitive to us at the moment. We currently pay about $500 per month for forecast data and this would rise to $1500 - $2000 per month for the 15 minute stuff.
Being a Brit, I can't comment on the baseball :)
I am not receiving notifications
Hello, Scott:
I am hoping to get some help for I am not getting my weather notifications. Was working fine up until I had to reset all settings on my device and when enabling all settings again, for some reason, now I am not getting any notifications at all from Weather Gods.
This is the only application that I am having this problem with right now.
I have checked all settings and everything is the way it should be but, for the life of me, I can't figure out what's wrong.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Lastly, I just want to thank you and congratulate you for having created such a wonderful app.
Cheers.
Not receiving notifications
Hi DrummerGuy
Interesting I've had a few queries the last couple of days with similar problems.
So far, it has turned out to be notifications disabled at the device level.
Can you please check and let me know:
You can switch back on by:
1. Load the device settings
2. Scroll to the bottom until you locate the entry for Weather Gods
3. Double tap to select and then swipe to Notifications
4. Double tap to select
5. Swipe until you find the âAllow Notificationsâ toggle switch
6. Toggle this to on and then relaunch Weather Gods
Regards
Scott
Also having notification problems
Since updating to iOS 11.2.2 last week, notifications from Weather Gods have been unreliable. At least twice now over the last few days, I failed to receive a daily summary notification. I am also not getting any notifications for precipitation, even though we are getting a mix of snow and freezing drizzle this morning. I got notified from Dark Sky about the weather conditions, and Weather Gods does correctly report the current conditions within the app, so the app is aware, but still no notification about it.
I havenât had any notification issues until this recent iOS update, which may or may not be related. I checked the Settings app, and notifications are still enabled for Weather Gods as usual, and notifications are still enabled within the app itself.
Also having notification problems
Hi dvdmth,
Sorry to hear about the notification problems. I think there is a more general problem as I didn't get any of my notifications due 5 minutes ago either.
Leave it with me and I will raise a support case with IBM.
Regards
Scott
Notification problems
Morning All,
I raised a ticket overnight with IBM who have now confirmed that are having problems with their push notification system. It's a repeat of a problem we saw last week.
They can't give me assurances at the moment when it will be permanently fixed, but they are working on it as a matter of urgency.
I can confirm it's working again this morning for me, but there may be more problems whilst they get to the bottom of it.
Thanks for your patience in this matter.
Best regards
Scott
Can't enable notifications
Hello Scott,
I have never used notifications in Weather Gods so I decided to give it a try after reading the recent posts in this thread. I followed the steps you described in your post of January 10th but when I get to the settings for WG I don't get an option to enable notifications. Is this feature available in all countries and all devices? I'm using WG on an iPhone SE running the latest ios in Canada.
Thanks.
Can't enable notifications
Hi Frankd,
Yes, they are available worldwide.
To make a start, when you load a location, you can swipe a couple of times until you hear 'No notifications active'. Double tap this button and it will take you to a screen where you can setup notifications.
Let me know please if you have already tried this without success?
Regards
Scott
Figured it out please disregard
Sorry to trouble you Scott I figured it out. Please disregard my previous post.
ThanksZ.
Figured it out please disregard
No trouble at all, glad you're sorted!
notification
FYI. Things are OK with my app. Using iOS 11.2.2 and no issues at this time.
notification
Thanks Holger,
It's actually good to know when things are working well, as it helps me narrow down the problem.