Stating The Obvious

Something happened to me today. I was browsing the app store and came across this (iTunes link). 3 years ago we wouldn’t have thought much of that. $AUD60 was a reasonable price for a decent mobile application, and you expected design like that on your phone. It was a phone after all, those things are limited!

Today we have this (iTunes Link). It costs $AUD5.99 and looks (in my biased opinion), damn hot. I know it’s stating the obvious, but we have come a long way in the mobile world. The iPhone and App Store that followed it has changed customers expectations forever. Now at the ‘premium’ price of $5.99 customers expect a designer to be involved, they expect the app to work well, to be easy to navigate and to look good. In short they expect nothing short of a desktop application experience, but tailored for their mobile device. They no longer think of their mobile phones as ‘limited’ just ’smaller’.

Personally I couldn’t be more excited, bring on iPhone OS 4.0, bring on Android 3.0, bring on the portable personal computer revolution!

Gold Gold Gold!

Just a quick post to pat ourselves on the back, for winning no less than a coveted Mactalk Gold Award:

http://www.mactalk.com.au/2010/01/01/the-2009-mactalk-app-awards-winners/

We’re currently on holidays until Monday the 4th, but after that we plan to bring you Pocket Weather World v1.1 and Pocket Weather AU 2.1. Sure we could just rest on our laurels, but where’s the fun in that!

Here’s hoping you had a happy and safe xmas and new year, and you’re all raring to go for 2010…now if only we could figure out if it’s pronounced twenty ten or two thousand and ten…one of lifes great mysteries!

Tennis Anyone?

Our biggest shiftyjelly app ever (in terms of initial man hours) is now available in the app store! It’s our most ambitious app ever, and also the first one we’ve ever done for our full time employer (Groundhog Software). Do we sound excited? We are, that’s because if this is successful it means we could be coding applications full time instead of just in the wee hours of the morning. It also means that we’re learning about all things iPhone at a much faster pace, which will translate to cool new features in things like our flagship app Pocket Weather AU.

The app let’s you score tennis games, and then view detailed statistics and graphs to see if you’re improving over time, or to gather intel on your opponents. You can then share that information with anyone else who has the application, but enough talking, if you know anyone that’s into tennis at any level, or you just want to support us, spread the word:

http://www.groundhog.com.au/tennis/

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.