Weather Gods 1.6.2

By Weather Gods (Scott), 2 March, 2018

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi All,

No, I didn't expect to be back quite so soon either :)

Unfortunately the last release introduced a very nasty random bug which would cause the weather wheel to crash. It affected about 2-3% of our user base, but I wasn't happy to leave it. Hopefully this one has now been squashed, although I was never able to reproduce it with my testing.

I also took the opportunity to fix a couple of other annoying bugs:

1. The voiceover navigation buttons in the weather wheel would sometime become disabled, even though there wasn't any specific reason for this to happen i.e. you weren't at the start or end of the wheel. I managed to recreate this one and hoping this is now fixed.

2. Feels like temperature not working for the night values - not sure how I ever missed this one but I did - especially with the cold UK weather - I've been checking the feels like quite a lot!

3. The final bug is something that may have left some people thinking they had follow me switched when in fact, internally, it was off. Unfortunately the toggle indicated on, which was not always the case. You should find now that the toggle is off if follow me is not setup.

Quick reminder of what is needed for follow me and the follow me notifications;

- Allow 'always' location access for Weather Gods
- Enable push notifications

Thereafter, Weather Gods will try and send a 24 hour weather push notification for a place that you are deemed to be stationary.

That's it for now and hopefully a little longer before the next one!

Regards
Scott

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Comments

By dvdmth on Monday, March 5, 2018 - 23:40

I don’t have this new version yet, but I wanted to give feedback regarding the follow me notifications. I got a chance to try it out for the first time today, and to be honest I don’t really care for how it is implemented.

I just went out for a walk in the neighborhood today, traveling no more than a half mile from my home, but that was enough to trigger a notification for my new location, even though I ended up back where I started. So, my first recommendation is not to send a follow me notification if the new location is too close to the previous one, say within a few miles.

More to the point, though, I would much rather have an implementation similar to how Weather Radio by WDT handles notifications. For that app, you have the option to configure any of the app’s notification options for either a fixed location or your current location. For example, if I ask to be notified for a severe weather alert, the app sends the notification for wherever I am at the time the alert goes out.

That is how I would like Weather Gods to operate, if possible. I have notifications set for daily summary, rain, snow, and wind, but for now I can only set these for a fixed location. If I could set these same notifications for my current location, wherever it may be in the future, that would be very much appreciated. If, for example, I attend a sporting event on the other side of town, then receiving rainfall notifications for my house won’t be useful, whereas the same rainfall notifications for the stadium would be handy.

That isn’t to say that notifications for specific places are useless. Indeed, for certain kinds of notifications, it probably makes more sense to set them up for a particular location, especially when commuting between two predetermined locations on a regular basis.

I hope my description makes some sense.

By Weather Gods (Scott) on Monday, March 5, 2018 - 23:40

Hi dvdmth,

Thanks for the feedback, all very useful and makes sense.

We are building this one in small steps and we will be adding severe weather alerts and looking to extend the notifications for your visited location. It takes time and we want to make sure we can get the basics working first.

I like the idea of checking the travel distance and only sending the notification if the distance is above a certain amount.It does mean we would need two points of reference and we currently only get one - the arrival destination. We can get more points of reference but that would mean ramping up the location monitoring, which then has an impact on battery - it's also something that Apple are trying to deter, unless you happen to be some sort of running, walking, navigation app etc.

Scott

By dvdmth on Monday, March 5, 2018 - 23:40

Anyone else having problems using this app? When I open it, I get the following message: “Weather data service is not responding (6403), double tap with two fingers to try again”

I also got multiple push notifications while out and about from the follow me feature complaining about being unable to fetch weather data.