ABOUT THE APP:
- Name: PH Weather
- Category: Weather and News
- Summary: A comprehensive app for weather condition, forecasts and news focused in the Philippines
- Requirements: Android 2.1 (Eclair) or later. (UI is not yet tablet optimized)
- Future versions: may include app for iPhone/iPad and Windows Phone7
FEATURES:
- WEATHER Tab
- Current Weather Condition (today)
- Weather Forecast for 7 days (1 week)
- Hourly Forecast for the selected day
- LOCATIONS Tab
- Multiple locations (but only one location shall be featured/active in the Weather tab)
- Last weather conditions are also shown (icon and temperature)
- Auto-detect current location
- SATELLITE Tab
- PAGASA satellite radar
- Kochi University satellite image
- Supports panning, zooming, auto-animation, manual-animation, and pinch-to-zoom
- NEWS Tab
- PAGASA Weather Forecast (updated at least twice daily 5:00 am and 5:00 pm). This is dependent to PAGASA's website
- PAGASA official twitter posts (the 20 latest tweets)
- News Stories (various weather news and articles from news sites )
- SETTINGS Tab
- Refresh Interval: define auto-refresh interval
- Notifications: Enable/disable notifications
- Rain Alert: Define rain precipitation levels alert
- Vibrate: Vibrate your phone when there will be notifications
- Ringtone: Choose ringtone for incoming notifications
- Temperature: Choose Celsius or Fahrenheit
- Wind: Choose Kilometer per hour or Miles per hour
- Precipitation: Choose Millimeters or Inches
- Source: Choose satellite images source between PAGASA or Kochi University, JAPAN
- Number of images: Total of images to load
- Interval in hours: The interval of time (hours) between the satellite images
- Reset to defaults: Reset/Revert to default settings defined by the app
Among the features above, I temporarily disabled notifications in the source code. The notification functionality is not yet completed.
User interface and graphical elements/icons will be improved over time. However, I need your feedback also about your UI experience.
HOW TO TEST:
- Use it as is, where is, as you like.
- Determine or report if you find issue/s
- Trivial: spelling/grammar issues; alignment issues
- Minor: UI/graphical related issues
- Major: Functional/Logical issues/bugs
- Critical: Application crashes/hangs;
- Suggest/Recommend/Feedback
- UI/graphical
- Features
- Nice to have
- Others
- What do you think?
NOTES:
- The main goal of making this app is I want to learn mobile application development, starting with Android then the rests (iOS and WP7).
- My other goals are.:
- Weather is crucial. In fact, I always check weather everyday. And my father is a fisherman, weather condition is the most crucial part of fishing in the deep blue sea.
- There are lots (thousands I think) of weather apps in the Android Market/Apple Store, but I have not seen yet a weather app, complete/comprehensive enough to the Philippine weather. So, I created this app to help/provide weather infos to the Filipino people.
- This is just the start. More mobile apps will follow later.
- I'm hesitant to put advertisements there, as we all know, ads are annoying. However, the reason I include ads is to support future versions and maintenance. For your information, the app involves web-service using Google Appengine. The appengine is free for limited quotas, once the quotas (monthly/daily) have been reached, I need to pay for it. And I don't want to use my own pocket for the server expenses in the future.
- The app will be released as free (ads supported) in the Android Market
- I have still features in mind and in notes that I planned to implement in the future versions of this app. But I need also your feedback. Your idea counts.
- This app is based from the top-rated Weather App and combined with the features I wanted to have.
DISCLAIMER:
- Do not use this app between life or death decision/situation. For informational purposes only. Please refer to the official authorities.
- The current weather data is provided by Yahoo Weather (I'll find more sources in the future versions)
- The weather forecasts data is provided by Norwegian Meteorological Institute
- Satellite/Radar images are from PAGASA and Kochi University, JAPAN
- News are from PAGASA. Twitter and Google News
- I'm neither a meteorologist nor a weather forecaster. I'm just a software developer/engineer interested in weather.
