PM Me Your AM

We just released v2.0.1 of Pocket Weather AU and v1.0.2 of Pocket Weather World to Apple. Exciting isn’t it! Well not really, as the minor number increments betray, they are both bug fix releases. In this case it’s a bizarre bug that took a little while to get to the bottom of. If you’re not technically minded, then feel free to go browse digg or something instead, here goes:

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"];

So what the above code is meant to do (once you give it a date) is to give it back to you in the format you asked for it. That’s what the doco says, and that’s what 99 times out of 100 it does. So a typical result might look like ‘20091108123301′ (for today). On some iPhones (and we have no idea what causes this) you get ‘20091108123301 PM‘. Yeah that’s right, you get ‘PM’ or ‘AM’ at the end even though you didn’t ask for it. This only happens to iPhones that are set to AM/PM time, but most of them behave, like we said it seems to be very rare indeed that you get this outcome.

Anyway the workaround for our users is to set their iPhone to 24 hour time. The code workaround is to do the following:

[dateFormatter setAMSymbol:@""];
[dateFormatter setPMSymbol:@""];

We’re just glad we got to the bottom of this diabolical bug, so we can get back to adding new features and tweaking existing ones

Official BOM Reply Re: Melbourne Observation & Wind

As some of you may have noticed, the BOM observation station in Melbourne stopped reporting wind information almost a month ago. We contacted the BOM to find out if this was a permanent thing or not, and here is their response:

“I have made some enquiries as to the status of the wind reports from the Melbourne City site and due to the influence of nearby buildings and the poor exposure of the sensor it was decided to turn off the wind reports from 1 September 2009. The suggested alternatives to use for Melbourne (winds) are Essendon Airport or if you need another backup St Kilda Marina.”

So there you have it, if you want wind from the Melbourne Observation post you could be waiting a long time. Pocket Weather AU let’s you switch though, so our recommendation is that if you care about the wind, choose one of the observation stations mentioned above

Pocket Weather AU 2.0 Part 4 (Final)

It’s the last day of the week (yay!) and the last update about the features coming in Pocket Weather AU 2.0. Today we cover some more mundane (but very important) tweaks:

• Tweaks to all of the skins, including skinning of the location list screen
• 3 new icons for heavy rain, fog and wind.
• Realtime UV support for some locations (from ARPANSA, more coming later)
• Radar updates improved to always get the most recent radars
• Option to disable rotation (eg: portrait only mode)
• Option to disable load on startup (useful for iPod touches)
• Many more bug fixes and server tweaks (there are literally too many to mention here, we re-wrote a large chunk of the code).

So what next you say? Rest we say! Then it’s straight on to the Pocket Weather World v1.1 upgrade!

Our designer also wants to completely overhaul Pocket Weather…but that’s a story for another day

Pocket Weather AU 2.0 Part 3

Pocket Weather AU 2.0 was released to Apple in the wee hours of this morning (2am to be precise) so please excuse the spelling mistakes grammer-erratical errors in this post. On Tuesday we explained the new Radar features in v2.0, yesterday we talked about how adding locations will be different, so today to celebrate the apps release (to Apple that is, it’s not on the store just yet…) we’re going to unveil the big ticket feature for 2.0!

A picture speaks a thousand words…

Vanilla push push baby! Pocket Weather AU 2.0, your iPhone will love it

Pocket Weather 2.0 Part 2

Yesterday we covered the new radar functionality that is coming in Pocket Weather 2.0, today we want to talk about adding locations. Adding locations in Pocket Weather has always been a breeze, but only to those familiar with the BOM information itself. In version 2.0 we’re making it easy for the non-BOM boffins among you to add locations as well. So here’s the summary:

• Totally revamped add location interface, showing information like what observations a given station supports and doesn’t support (eg: wind, current temp, real-time UV, etc)
• Find nearest location function revised to give you the 20 closest locations and letting you choose the best. It’s now faster as well, because it no longer has to contact our server.
• Pick locations from a map. For those of you out there that are more spatially minded.
• Pick from just the capital cities (for the city slickers out there)
• Ability to give your locations custom names, so you could have ‘Home’ instead of ‘Adelaide Airport’
• Of course you can still see all the locations in a given state, so don’t worry BOM boffins, that function is still there
• Location information is now cached on your device, so it’s a lot more data cap friendly

Well that’s it for todays update, tomorrow we are going to talk about some firmware 3.0 goodness that we’ve built into Pocket Weather, and we know that you’ll really love.

Pocket Weather AU 2.0

Now that we’ve finalised the feature set for Pocket Weather AU 2.0, and are only days from releasing it from Apple, we’ve decided to announce one new set of features on Twitter (http://twitter.com/shiftyjelly) every day until Apple approves the update. In case you missed it todays are:

• Live Radar (if turned on this keeps your radar up to date automatically)
• Find/Track Me on the radar screen
• Pick radars in any state (previously you could only pick the ones in the state your location was in)
• New Terrey Hills Sydney Radar
• New Radar infrastructure that allows us to roll out new radars to our users without an application update

As you can see todays update was all about Radars. Tomorrow we’ll be talking about how we’ve re-worked the way you add new locations. By the time the update gets approved by Apple we should have covered everything there is to know about the biggest and best version of Pocket Weather AU yet!

Where In The World is shiftyjelly

Things are eerily quiet in the shiftyjelly Offices, which may lead you to think that we’re all sleeping on the job. The truth is that we are working harder than ever on some of the biggest updates that the Pocket Weather world has ever seen! So what’s coming?

Pocket Weather AU 2.0

We haven’t forgotten our Australian app, instead it’s getting the biggest update it’s ever seen, here are just some of the things that are included:

• New Terry Hills radar, and a framework to add new radars on the fly without updating the app.
• New radar functionality that we’re keeping mum on.
• Some 3.0 features that will blow your socks off (and maybe even make your head explode!) Again we’re keeping mum on exactly what’s involved.
• Real-time UV updates, handy for summer so you can see exactly when you’re mostly like to turn into crispy bacon…mmmm bacon…
• New options including disabling rotation, and more control of when the app auto-loads.
• A lot of code re-writing and optimising, making for the smoothest, slickest and most complete version yet!

Pocket Weather World with Push 1.1

Our newest app, and the one we’re still exciting about updating

• Support for weather warnings, and push notifications on those warnings.
• Support for animated radars

The obvious question is when are these coming out? And the answer is simple: ‘When they’re done’. We are talking about weeks, not months, but we will take as long as we need to, because we want to release updates oozing with quality, instead of jumping the gun and getting shot in the back.

Pocket Weather World with Push

We are very excited to be able to introduce you to the newest app in the shiftyjelly fold:

http://www.shiftyjelly.com/pocket-weather-world.html

It’s an application that takes Pocket Weather AU to the international market, and adds some very nifty features like the ability to have the current temperature pushed to your iPhone, without ever needing to open the application. It’s an application that has been many, many months in the making and we hope you like it. It may initially look like Pocket Weather AU pointed at a different data source, but in truth it’s been completely re-written from the ground up and there is a lot of cool things inside it that we can build on for the future. We will of course be porting a lot of this code back to the AU version as well, so look out for more exciting features in that version shortly!

A big thanks to the shiftyjelly team for their patience on this one. There were many interesting moments in the development where we had to get creative to solve the roadblocks that came up. The Application icon for example went through about 20 different iterations, finally ending on one that looks like an obvious brother of Pocket Weather AU.

Our intention going forward is to keep improving both Pocket Weather AU and Pocket Weather World until they are the weather apps of choice for the entire world.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it, use it, love it!

The App Stores On Fire!

It would seem lately that every man and his dog has been posting things on how much they dislike the app store. I think they all have valid points, but are also missing the forest for the trees. A lot of people ask us what we think of Apple and the App Store, so we thought we may as well write a quick post on it:

The Upsides

Firstly, let’s start with the positives, and there are a lot. Apple provides a distribution mechanism to well over 20 million iPhone/iPod Touch devices worldwide, and all they ask is a $US99 fee and 30% of the revenue generated. They handle all the payment processing, bandwidth, customer complaints and refunds without a developer having to life a finger. A lot of developers seem to forget that this platform is unique, I mean where else in the world can a fart app earn you close to a million dollars? Apple also copy protects your work for you, meaning you don’t have to worry about serial numbers and licensing. The system is not uncrackable, but the bar is set high enough that you don’t normally have to worry about piracy.

Then there’s the advertising side, for the lucky few Apple advertises our products for free. Apple picked our application Pocket Weather AU as a ‘Staff Pick’ and sales tripled overnight, and stayed high for well over a month. Our competitor Oz Weather gets even better treatment, being splashed all over magazine ads, and lit up in fluorescent glory in all the Apple stores around Australia. All this Apple does for free. I accept that if you’re not one of the chosen ones that’s not a bonus, but there is always that lucky dip aspect of magically appearing in the Staff Picks, What’s Hot or What’s New sections, or sometimes just being featured with other applications that are similar to your own.

Finally there’s the store itself, which supports browsing, reading reviews, screenshots, suggestions and a lot more. All that is great, but the better part is that this store is installed on every single iPhone and iPod Touch sold, and also on most of the desktop computers that these devices sync with.

The Downsides

Of course it would be remiss of us not to mention the many flaws in the App Store as well:

• Review times can sometimes be almost a month, even for minor updates. As a developer there is only one thing more frustrating than releasing an application that contains a bug, and that’s not being able to get the fix to the bug into your users hands for weeks on end. It’s painful, trust us.
• Reviews are fairly random, and things that got through in one release may not pass the second time. Every rejection (even for the most minor of matters) puts you back to the start of the queue.
• The Review process is opaque. There’s no way to know where your application is in the queue and how long it will be before it’s looked at or approved.
• The App store contains over 50,000 applications, even if you do a brilliant job it may still be hard to rise above the noise. Add to that the fact that competition drives prices down, and you may have a hard time charging anything more than a few dollars for your work.
• There’s no way to charge for upgrades on the store, which is a downside if you run a server (like we do) with ongoing costs. It also discourages developers from putting effort into bigger and better releases. This is a real problem if you intend to create an application that fills a small niche, because you sure as heck can’t make up for the difference by volume.
• When you have a problem getting paid, or with the store in general, there are no phone numbers to call, and emails more often than not don’t receive responses. At one point Apple violated their agreement with us (and many others) by not paying within 45 days of the end of the month and we emailed all the different contacts we could find, without a single response. Eventually they paid us, but it’s a damn good thing we weren’t relying on that money to feed our families.

As you can see, most of the downsides are most probably related to staffing problems at Apple. If Apple can figure out how to make the review and email processes scale, then 70% of the problems would be gone overnight and developers would be free to concentrate their whining on that last 30%. Overall the App Store has been a roller coaster that we’ve enjoyed riding. Despite that we are still holding out hope that Android and the Palm Pre take off, and give Apple the much needed incentive to improve the experience for all the developers that have made their phone such a success.

Version 1.5 is now available in the App Store

Apple finally approved version 1.5 of Pocket Weather AU yesterday, so go grab it and let us know what you think. The main features included are:

• The Settings have been moved into the application. Since the emails we keep getting seem to indicate that most people didn’t know they existed, they should now be a lot easier to find. Thanks go to the guys from the IconFactory for publishing a very nice library that helped us do this very easily.
• Animated icons are now available (you can turn them on from the settings mentioned above)
• We added the backup Melbourne Airport radar, since the main one in Melbourne is still having problems.
• We also tweaked the application loading time, and response time in a few of the screens.

We hope you like it, and we hope to bring you many more free updates in the future. We’re still deciding on the features of 1.6 but we already have a few like custom naming of locations, adding tide offsets to the tide display, the ability to cache tides so you can view them offline and a setting for locking the screen rotation for those of you that only want to see it in landscape or portrait. Feel free to leave comments with any additional features you want, or email us at support@shiftyjelly.com.

In other news we’re still working away in the background on a few other projects, which we hope to release weeks ago, but such is life, we’re going to hold onto them until they are fully baked and ready to go.