cliMate v3.6 Released!

I am pleased to report that version 3.6 of climate Animated Weather Widget has been released.

What does this new version have, you ask?

• Added Night and Sunrise/Sunset scenes to Chinese Art Theme
• Clock can now be moved and resized
• Improved Clock resolution and readability
• Added Portuguese Translation
• Improved Russian and Hungarian Translation
• Bug fixes for clock refresh
• Simplified settings layout

Here are a few examples of the Chinese Art sunset and night scenes:

 

Then for the clock resizing, this is now accessed via the new Clock settings screen available from the main Settings:



The Size and Position setting now lets you drag the clock to any of 9 positions, and drag the slider to change the clock size, all the while seeing a preview of how it will look on your widget:



This works of course for all the clock styles, including analogue, and gives you a lot more freedom to customize your widget. I currently like the look of a smaller clock on the bottom right:



In order to support clock resizing, I have had to improve the resolution and sharpness of the clock, and that have also given me the freedom to change clock fonts in the future, look for that in the next version.

So what's next? I want to have a morning/day/evening/night forecast for the current day, something like the look below. You would then be able to swipe between this and the usual 5 day forecast. This is work in progress, but I know now exactly how to get that daily forecast information.



Then of course, new themes. Still playing around with various ideas, but I do like the idea of a Jungle theme, even though it will be hard to justify a snow scene!



Other ideas include window style frames that could be added to various themes, and perhaps a coastal lighthouse. Keep your ideas for themes coming in!

 

Yet More Chinese Theme

I really wasn't happy with the overall look of my new Chinese Theme.

The layout and ideas were fine, it just didn't look right, too faded out. I know was trying to emulate a sketch or pencil drawing, but it just doesn't have the impact of the other themes, it didn't look pencilly enough, and it was not easy to see at a glance what the weather condition is, which is after all the whole point.

So I was playing with ways of increasing the contrast, making it darker and more easy to see, and came across a nice visual effect to make it look more like a water-colour painting.

As it happens I visited the studio of a water-colour artist during my recent holiday in England, and it inspired me a little. Thus the theme now looks a lot more like a moving painting, more arty and abstract, and less worry about photo realism.

I think this is an improvement on the screenshot in the last post, much easier to see what is going on, and if nothing else gives me an obvious title for the theme: Chinese Watercolour

More Chinese Theme..

Been doing more work on the Chinese Painting theme showing a misty mountain lake, see below:

First off, blending the edges so they fade into white, to give more of a paper or canvas feel.
Then added a bridge and gatehouse in the foreground, with a new animation of a galloping horse and rider that runs across the curve of the bridge.

The fishing boat now drifts slowly behind the bridge.

The waterfall animation is improved at larger resolutions, and the flying birds are faded out a bit so that they don't appear so high contrast.

The tree branches on the right still wave in the breeze, and drop flower petals at random intervals.

The pink water lilies at the front drift across the lake.

Still to do:

• Improve the lily animation and add more flowers to the lake foreground.
• Redo the far mountains behind the temple

Then will start work on the weather animations, and changing the colours of the forecast thumbnails so that they work with the white background.

I have decided to keep this a more stylized theme based on a single painting which is set during the day, so there will be no sunset or night versions. That will also mean its quicker to finish!

After that I need to investigate a city theme, but I had a nice idea for a African Savannah theme, with Kilimanjaro rising in the background, waving yellow grasses in the foreground, some nice baobab trees that would look great in silhouette at night and during sunset, and of course some nice animated animals, perhaps giraffes. And maybe a landrover crossing the screen..

cliMate v3.4 Released

This was a quick release to fix a long standing issue since 3.0 that I finally got a handle on, as I was getting several reports of the Current Location not working, which just didn't make sense. If the phone returns a set of GPS coordinates, then the weather providers should always return data for the nearest weather station, but this was failing, even though the coordinates had been obtained.

With the help of one user, we narrowed it down to World Weather Online, and to when running under Czech language, at which point I could replicate and fix it.

It turns out that many languages use the comma character ',' to indicate a decimal point, instead of the period character '.' which is used in the UK, US etc. When the phone was running under such a language, it was returning the GPS coordinates using a comma, so -13.48123 became -13,48123. Open Weather Map is able to handle both commas and periods for decimal points, but World Weather Online was always expecting a period, so it was failing and returning error messages.

This is now fixed, and v3.4 should now have the Current Location working fine under all different locales and languages for all Weather Providers.

Version 3.3 nearing release..

So I have been hard at work on the next version of cliMate, with a lot of minor bug fixes but several notable improvements.

First off, a brand new Stonehenge theme for the widget, which looks really dramatic and striking:

 

 

 

Then a new Moonset and Moonrise animation and time indicator on the main screen, which is shown instead of the sunrise and sunset animation during night time scenes:

 

 



 

Then a whole bunch of small fixes for things:

• Ensuring the dates on the forecast are shown using the correct local settings, e.g. 5/26 in the US versus 26/5 in Europe
• Fixing the layouts when the widget is stretched extremely wide
• A range of crash fixes
• Fixes for forecasts where the Chance of Storm condition was used instead of Thunderstorm
• Improved animation on Thunderstorm forecast animation
• Added the ability to hide today's date
• Added the ability to hide the jet contrails on the Clear and Partly Cloudy conditions

I had the occasional report that the clock shown on the widget is not syncing up with the phone's actual time, but until now I have not been quite sure how to deal with it. So also trialing a new method of determining when the screen is switched on and hence when to update the clock.

 

A lot of testing to go, and then should aim to release maybe next week.

CliMate Update - New Main Screen and Weather Provider

Time for an update on recent work to CliMate.

On the main screen:
 

• The layout for a particular widget location is now much improved and linked to the chosen Theme for that widget.
• If the Countryside Theme is chosen, the windmill rotation is based on the current wind speed
• There is a new sunrise/sunset animation; the sun rises over the sunrise time indicator, travels across the "sky" and sets above the sunset time indicator. 

Also started to add a new weather provider. The accuracy of OpenWeatherMap varies enormously according to location; for some areas it is perfect, others have severe problems with accuracy. For other locations, the accuracy depends on the time of year; here in Hong Kong for example its fine throughout the year apart from about 3 months around April, where it is not able to keep up with the constant shifting of fine weather to rainy weather.

Everyone wants AccuWeather, but they are no longer giving out API keys; so I can't get free or paid data for it.

The next best option seems World Weather Online; based on my tests so far it is more accurate and up to date than OpenWeatherMap, but of course is not free. So I will be rolling that out with the next release and hoping that will resolve most users accuracy issues.

New cliMate Work in progress..

After the successful release of version 2.0 of climate featuring fully resizable widgets, its time to start work on the next set of features.

Currently working on new Weather Providers, and trying to balance the free services they give against the potential number of users. One service for example, whilst probably giving better results than Open Weather Map, has a limit of 4000 requests a day. Assuming the weather is updated say 8 times a day, that only allows for 500 possible users, which is pretty low.

Simultaneously I am working on getting the main app screen to match the theme of the widget. This is going very well, and I will be adding even more features to that screen, but it is a little slow to display, not quite sure why.

Anyway, here is the main screen before:

And what it will look like on the next version! That's right, you get the full sized animated version of the widget, with all the bells and whistles, forecasts, humidity and animated Beaufort Scale wind speed. I hope to match the windmill arms speed to the Beaufort scale, when the windmill theme is being shown.

 

I will play around a little with the proportions of the forecast areas and humidity area to get it perfect.

 

Also hoping to add an animated sunrise/sunrise time indicator on the left.

 

I also made it slide left and right when you swipe the screen to look at other locations, but again due to the slowness displaying the new layout, its not that fast. I hope I can fix that, as it looks fantastic.

 

 

Almost ready for Resizable release!

Well, its been a tough 2 months, I didn't think I was going to be able to do it when I first started, but finally I have all the Weather Conditions for all 3 themes converted to a fully resizable format.

The Black Glass and Skyscape themes have been given a new lease of life, look much better in the larger sizes with the built-in forecasts.

I just added a new notification that is shown when your widget is set to Current Location but your device can't get a current location. This is usually caused by the device's Location Settings being switched off, which might not be due to a deliberate action by the user, but could have been automatically done without the user's knowledge in low power situations, or by some Battery Saver type apps.

Testing the new version on all 4 of my devices right now, then will release a version 2.0 hopefully this weekend. It is going to have to be a minimum Android version of 3.0, but that is no great hardship, as it only rules out 7% of all devices at the moment.

Then after release, its time to look at new Weather Providers..

Resizing Haze Condition complete...

On to Mist, then Ice..

 

More resizing work.. snow complete

Working as fast as I can on the resizing, but its an awful lot of work.

Completed snow today, onto snow showers, then sleet.

4x2 is still going to be there!

I had an email asking if the 4x2 widget was still going to be available, as all the recent screenshots I have shown have been of the larger sizes. Yes, it most definitely is. The default size when you add the widget is 4x2, but you can then drag the edges like any other resizable widget, and make it whatever size you want.

Here is the new 4x2 style on the top, and the current version on the bottom, so you can see how the new one has stretched to use more of the available 4x2 area.

More resizable widget work in progress

The resizable weather widget is coming on well after a few false starts. The forecast is now showing when necessary, although it's not fully animated. That puts too much strain on the widget, so it's limited to a rotating sun, animated the rain forecasts etc unfortunately slows the widget down too much.

Anyway it looks great, completed all the clouds scenes now, starting work on the storms, rain and snow scenes.