Wednesday, March 30, 2016

New version 3.7 released!

So the new version 3.7 of cliMate Animated Weather Widget was released on Monday 29th.

What's new?

First fixed a problem with the fonts on the forecast part of the widget, this only occurred when using Next 3D Launcher, due to a bug in that launcher. I finally developed a work around, and the fonts are perfect now.
 
Then there were a few issues when using the Weather Only setting, the idea here being that no text at all is shown. There were two problems, the Refreshing icon was still showing, and the there was a grey background in the forecast area showing for some weather conditions, as it was expecting to use that to make the forecast details show up better. As there is no need for either of those during Weather Only, they are now hidden.
 
The Font on the wind speed units was not scaling correctly to the screen size, that is now fixed.

Then I improved the 
Rain Shower and and Snow Shower forecast thumbnails, made the falling rain and snow bigger and easier to see, and the sun and clouds more clear.

And finally, there is a brand new Town House theme. This is actually based on the view from my parent's house in England. It features the usual weather conditions, birds and plane in the background, but in the foreground we have an Audi driving up the driveway, cars driving past on the High Street in the distance, and the flag of your current country waving from the top of the tower behind the trees. The cars have headlights at night. Finally, there is a little solar powered flower toy that moves its leaves based on the amount of sunlight available.

This theme was a labour of love and originally just going to be for my parents and nieces, but I decided to share it with everyone as its a lot of fun!


 
 
So now started work on something completely different, a pirate theme!
 
This simulates the view from a porthole on a pirate ship. The whole view outside the window moves and rotates as if the ship is moving in the sea, looks super realistic. There will be islands and ships moving past, seagulls, maybe dolphins or sharks or a whale, and inside the cabin will be lots of piratical stuff, like chests of gold, treasure maps and cutlasses. The below is a sneak peak of a proof of concept to see how the movement worked. Will start in earnest on that next week.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

World Weather Online issues resolved!

The World Weather Online API has resolved its issues, it seemed to be due to server maintenance.

The normal method I used for accessing their API didn't work over the last weekend for some unknown reason, but using slightly different JAVA code access their data did work, so I released a new version 3.6.1 with that variation.

Now, the server has gone back to normal, and the normal method works once again. Nonetheless I am sticking with the new access method for the moment.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Problems with WorldWeatherOnline Weather

There seems to be some problems with the WorldWeatherOnline Weather Provider, it is returning errors since yesterday, you will see a "Please try again later" response.

Apologies for this, I am trying to find out what is going on, it seems like they are doing server maintenance and that might be the cause.

In the meantime you can change Weather Provider to Open Weather Map in the Set Location part of the Setting screen, click on Preferred Weather Data and select Open Weather Map.