blog.emerick.org

First off I would like to note that YWeather was listed as one of the best BlackBerry weather applications by BBGeeks. Thanks everyone for making it a successful, simple weather application. In an effort to keep YWeather a top notch program, I have just made some updates to it today.

The updates include:

• Home screen icon and name update based on current conditions.
• More information on the current conditions.
• Automatically update while running in the background.
• Smaller application size.

The home screen icon and name updates was probably one of the top requested features. One note about this feature is that the home screen name updates will only work with OS 4.2 or greater. This is due to a limitation of the BlackBerry API. Automatic updates were kind of necessary for the home screen updates to really be useful. If you don’t want to use the bandwidth for automatic updates this can be disabled in the options and is disabled by default. You can also choose how often you would like the updates to occur, from 15 minutes to 120 minutes in 15 minute increments, however, Yahoo! Weather usually only updates their weather feed every hour or so. When an update occurs, it will automatically update the home screen icon and name. When YWeather is closed, the name and icon will return to the original icon and the name “YWeather!” To leave YWeather running in the background, just make sure press the end phone call button and not the escape key. The options for the automatic updates can be found on the options screen as seen below as well as the home screen name and icon updated with the current conditions.

As far as more information on the current conditions, I have added wind speed, direction, and chill; humidity; visibility; barometric pressure and its state; sunrise and sunset times. This additional data can be seen in the screen shot below.

The application is now 50% smaller than the first. Instead of using the original GIF images from Yahoo! Weather, I converted them all to PNG files which make the total size of the application around 94KB, down from around 200KB. That should make it a little better on your memory starved BlackBerry.

So what’s up next for YWeather? Well the next most requested feature would have to be support for multiple locations so that will most likely be next. I am also looking into adding more weather forecast data as this was highly requested. The tough part is finding a good, free source of weather data that supports international users as well. I am looking at combining both Google and Yahoo!’s weather data to provide for more forecast data but we will see.

You can install YWeather via OTA or download from here: http://bbrtm.org/yweather/

As always, if you have any feedback for YWeather, feel free to leave a comment here or send me an email.

./Jason