Weather Gods 2.5 Released - new weather provider!

By Weather Gods (Scott), 19 October, 2020

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi All,

After months of coding and testing we finally have Weather Gods working with our new weather Provider, AerisWeather.

There is good and not so good news...

The good
- Everything you had before is still there after the update, including the weather text summaries. AerisWeather (AW) don't actually have these summaries so we developed a weather text generator, which was a monumental task.
- The Weather Wheel now has 10 days of weather data
- The watch complications are more reliable and very rarely miss their 30 minute updates
- The data service seems more reliable than the service we got from IBM

The not so good
- Accuracy of the weather data can be problematic for UK and Europe. AW are aware of this, I have submitted a lot of bug reports, and they are actively working on fixes
- We only have access to severe weather alerts for English, French and Spanish. AW tell me they hope to extend to other languages soon

Long term benefits
- We should be able to bring severe weather alerts to the watch face and complications
- We can start to add other data points such as lightning and air quality. We do have to pay for this data so we will probably switch to a subscription model at some point in the new year. However, paid users will not be expected to pay again for something already paid for, only for additional data which is not available today.

Other changes
- There is a new option in settings for quickly and easily adding shortcuts to Siri. It's context aware, so if you load the weather for New York, then going into this new menu would allow you to quickly setup shortcuts for New York. You can change to a different location, pop back into the menu, and setup shortcuts for that new location, all without leaving the WG app
- Lots of bug fixes and performance improvements

It's important that you update to 2.5 if you would like to continue using WG. From November 14th, IBM cut off our data and versions of the app older than 2.5 will no longer work. Please let anyone know who has WG and might not read this post.

Finally, a massive than you to the beta testers and the translators. It's been a bit of a long haul but I have really appreciated all the testing, translating and bugs found.

Please let me know how you find the new weather provider in terms of accuracy. Good and bad. I will feedback any issues I find to them.

Right, I need to take a rest :)
Scott

Options

Comments

By KE8UPE on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

Hi,
I’m not seeing the update in the US App Store.

By Weather Gods (Scott) on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

Hi,

I think it takes a while for Apple to roll out the updates.

By Tanya Harrison on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

Hi Scott, I am more than happy and willing to pay for a subscription, providing the weather is accurate in New Zealand and Australia. Thank you for all your hard work.

By Holger Fiallo on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

Doing beta and is great. Do I continue with it or need to get the app? Like how now in OS 7, for the new faces I get the temperature. This is worth any money if I need to pay. My cat likes it. I am getting my notification without no issues. Thanks for the great job.

By Weather Gods (Scott) on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

Hi Holger,

Please continue to use the beta. I will be starting the next release within a couple of weeks.

By DPinWI on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

The new weather provider is working well for me. So far, the information is accurate, timely, and the new synopsis text was a job well done.

I will keep a watch on my watch to see if it updates more often and predictably, but so far, it seems better.

Thanks

By KE7ZUM on Sunday, October 25, 2020 - 19:38

I don't think I have the update as of yet, but I only install updates on certain days of the week, and only when there is an even number. I know I'm weird, however in case there are any issues I wait anyway for a few days for them to be ironed out. Can't wait to install this.

Whatever works for you. The app is doing well and notification keep coming. No issues with getting the weather.