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"wX" Android opensource/free weather app - new beta release 3.4

Under the IMAGE tab, the two composite radar screens in the upper right corner are non-functional... the app suddenly stops and resets when I depress them...
 
Under the MISC tab, the #tornado box in the lower right does not have an option to launch the external browser like the #txwx box does...
 
SBartholomew said:
Under the IMAGE tab, the two composite radar screens in the upper right corner are non-functional... the app suddenly stops and resets when I depress them...
Click to expand...

Thanks for mentioning. I think this bug was added recently but only impacted those who have not yet used those activities. Fixed in the release I'm about to release.
Regarding twitter I've enhanced the generic webview activity used for tornado and others to now have the same external launch option as the state twitter searches.
 
The latest version 3.5392 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
- Lightning icon on MISC tab now leads to a dedicated lighting activity including a new content provider ( lightningmaps.org ) , selection of multiple sectors and time ranges.
- HRRR has been moved out of the BETA area and replaces the SPC Compmap on MISC tab ( SPC Compmap was moved to SPC tab earlier ). For now only the HRRR operational ( hourly ) is presented. This source has the most parameters for HRRR from any provider used in wX but unfortunately it's also the slowest in terms of response time for loading the images. I still consider this in BETA mode but useful from the main screen.
- SPC Mesoanalysis - added paramters SARS Hail Size, SARS Sig. Hail Percentage , Microburst Composite
- Changes in last BETA releated to storage mechanism for sharing images.
- WXOGL now supports share of animated GIFs
- Bugfix in COD 1km/2km when run for first time
- Most WebView based content now has menu item to open in external browser

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality.

thanks,
Josh
 
The latest version 3.5401 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
( lack of SPC MCD and SLGT or higher Conv Outlooks after Monday has made testing of the first two features difficult this week )
- Before this release notifications were avilable for SPC Mesoscale discussions but they triggered for any location in the US. With this release in addition to this you can now enable SPC MCD notifications for any of your configured locations. This can be enabled in the settings screen for any particular location. The location specific notification will only differ by the icon used and the text of the notification is prefixed with the location label in parens.
- Before this release notifications were availble for SPC Convective outlooks at slight or higher level impacting any US location. With this release in addition to this you can now enable SPC Convective outlook notification for any of your configured locations. One caveat applies: since polygon are not used all the time there are some corner case scenarios (not yet addressed) that might result in false positives or simply not notifying ( such as one line through Florida with a slight risk to the south yet not forming a polygon since there is only one line )
- Animated GIFs if requested for sharing are now generated in the background
- In Location settings if you search for an address the search token is now entered into the location label by default.

NOTE: Debug status in preferences should not be enabled for normal use as in some cases certain features use historical data instead of current data ( as in SPC convective outlooks since there wasn't much this week after Monday )

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality. Thankyou to those who suggested the new notifications.

thanks,
Josh
 
Hi Josh...

Your app continues to be an excellent product and I use frequently. Can't detect any issues with your latest edition.

I thought a while on suggested additions, but have none at the moment. That's a compliment to your app.

Pat
 
plreardon said:
Hi Josh...

Your app continues to be an excellent product and I use frequently. Can't detect any issues with your latest edition.

I thought a while on suggested additions, but have none at the moment. That's a compliment to your app.

Pat
Click to expand...

Pat,
Thanks for checking in, glad it's working well for you!

Josh
 
The latest version 3.5404 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
- Bugfix in SPC Location notifications D4-8. A bug in a regular expression was exposed once some live data became available over night to test against.
- SPC D1,D2 Fire weather outlooks location notifications. Added for completeness and since the format was very similar to convective outlooks.
- COD Model share option now includes the time for the image.

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality. Thankyou to those who suggested the new notifications.

thanks,
Josh
 
Looking good, Josh! I have never seen a more robust, complete product. I continue to use it several times a day and look forward to the weekly updates for the latest tweaks and additions! If you ever put this in the Play Store, I would gladly purchase this without hesitation!
 
As someone who is constantly looking for a complete weather application for their phone, I have found it and my search is over. Great app!
 
SBartholomew said:
Looking good, Josh! I have never seen a more robust, complete product. I continue to use it several times a day and look forward to the weekly updates for the latest tweaks and additions! If you ever put this in the Play Store, I would gladly purchase this without hesitation!
Click to expand...

Appreciate you taking the time to say this and thanks for the great feedback along the way !
 
The latest version 3.5411 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
- Notifications can now be configured to be non-persistent. In the past notifications existed for the life of the event regardless if they were dismissed. Now, if Settings->Notifications->"Alert only once" is set to on you can dismiss the first notification and it will not come back.
- A new feature best used with the feature above. If Settings->Notifications->"Auto cancel notifs" is enabled the notification will clear itself after clicking on it. Both of these might become defaults in the future.
- COD Mesoanalysis images - new activity in Beta area ( long press on lightning icon in MISC tab ).
- If simple mode (disable all tabs but the first thus presenting a somewhat general purpose weather app ) is enabled the top toolbar is now hidden on the front screen.
- In "AFD" ( WFO text product viewer ) if the product is not avaible it will state a message instead of showing nothing.
- Recent changes in the NWS forecast website required a change in a regular expression needed to save a new location from within the NWS alerts acitivity ( MISC tab, 2nd row, left )

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality. Thankyou to those who suggested the new notifications features.

thanks,
Josh
 
The latest version 3.5412 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
- Bugfix: recent URL change on WPC site caused most items related to WPC to break including QPF and forecast graphic ( MISC tab ).

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality.

thanks,
Josh
 
I was on track to do a release for today but this got diverted onto a problem not necessarily related to wX. For sometime I've used older cellphone technology and really didn't use wX much on the cellular network. Recently I got something much newer and better and was quite shocked to see how poorly both SPC and GOES content could sometimes be over LTE. I did enhance the code in wX responsible for http/ftp downloads to retry downloads ( with a random and increase backoff interval ) which somewhat alleviated the problem.

Still the responsiveness was nothing like other content such as COD or even from alerts.weather.gov or forecast.weather.gov. I went ahead and notified the webmasters for both SPC and GOES and even engaged my wireless provider ( their level 1 was of no help as I anticipated ) but ultimately through experimentation discovered that disabling IPv6 and bypassing the DNS servers provided by the wireless provider when on their cellular network would vastly improve the user experience for both SPC and GOES data. However, doing these things requires one to root your Android and do some other things I really didn't want to have to do. I do hope NWS fixes their servers but in the meantime if you are experiencing poor initial connections to SPC or GOES content you can likely solve your issues by disabling IPv6 and going to alternate DNS servers. Unfortunately, this is not as trivial as it could be.

If others are having an issue like this I'd be curious to know your cellular provider and Android version to know how pervasive this issue is and to also help NWS understand how widespread this issue might be. Mine is ATT via Cricket and 4.4.2. I also used an independent app ( Firefox ) to duplicate the problem and confirm it wasn't something odd about wX.

Just to reiterate ( for me anyway ) this only applies to when the device is using the cellular network, not WIFI.

I'll release the new release sometime next week.
 
The latest version 3.5504 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
- The functionality to show the sunrise/sunset ( by tapping the summarized 7 day forecast on front screen and scrolling to bottom ) has moved from pulling the data from a .com weather provider to computing the times locally. Two additional advantages are the time will display following Android's global time setting of either AM/PM or 24 hr time and for locations outside your timezone the times will be listed for the timezonze your android device is currently configured for.
- Support for non-US locations was added last summer as an experiment when I was undecided on what US features to add next. Unfortunately New Zealand's non-govt weather provider has restrictions in place on how data may be reproduced and thus it's being disabled from within wX. The source code remains (for now) but the ability to access it from within location settings has been removed. I doubt anyone is using this so it's just an FYI. Canada (somewhat useful)and Australia will remain. With this change and the change above wX mostly sources weather content from .org, .gov, and .edu entities. (twitter widgets the one expception) This should make other forms of distribution easier.
- Additional changes were made for tracking what notifications have been issused so that when "alert only once" is configured notifications will not fire for a 2nd time due to flaky networks.
- In the dedicated HRRR model viewer ( MISC tab, top row, right ) in addition to the HRRR NCEP production run the HRRR Experimental ( which is actually the default if one visits the website ) is now available. Limited testing has been performed so far.
- COD Mesoanalysis previously in BETA is now accessible from the submenu in COD Models
- In settings, deprecated themes based on white and another color were removed from the pull down menu. Going forward the most supported themes will continue to be blue, black, green, gray, and to a lesser extent white.
- Dialog boxs for pre Android 5.x devices now use material design theme. ( such as help, about, radar status )
- To support the above feature the support library was updated to v7.22.1.1
- Underlying NDK and SDK used to create this release were both updated to current revisions, minor version number was bumped up to mark this change and the one below.
- Development environment was switched from Eclipse ADT to Java Studio so source code tree has a different structure. ( source code is available for each release )

NOTE: The previously mentioned http changes related to retry/backout have been taken out as they caused issues. Since the root cause was determined to be an IPv6 issue anyway it was not an issue to remove this since it's been working fine for some time.

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality.

thanks,
Josh
 
Hey Josh. I've noticed the Lightning graphic will not load with this update.
 
Thanks for the report. Just to confirm you mean activity accessed via MISC tab, right column, 3 rows down?

Does it crash or just not show up? What sector are you trying to view? What time period if something other then the default? Did you use successfully in prior release version?

Josh
 
Yes, that's correct. App doesn't crash, it just doesn't show up.
 
Tried viewing all sectors, used 15 minute and 2 hour time periods.
 
Lightning map shows up normally using Chrome on my phone. Also, QPF and Forecast Maps display properly within the app.
 
I'll be posting a release tomorrow around noon and I'll have an entry in the Beta area ( long press lightning icon ) which uses the activity which handles QPF and Forecast maps but actually display the URL I gave above ... should allow me to narrow this down depending on if it works for you.

thanks,
Josh
 
The latest version 3.5515 has been uploaded to the URL below as "wX.apk". The next oldest version has been renamed to include the version number:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9OogdTO1kXqYzktaHZzdGdQSEk&usp=sharing

Android 4.2 or later is required.

Changes:
- Previously SPC Watches were shown with one color configurable in settings. Now tornado watches are show with the same color as tornado warnings and severe thunderstorm watches with same color as severe thunderstorm warning.
- Settings related to radar have been moved out of the main settings screen and into a separate radar settings activity.
- In the default radar ( WXOGL ) you can now access the new dedicated radar settings from the sub-menu present in WXOLG.
- WXOGL was modified with enhancements so that any changes in settings were reflected when leaving radar settings if invoked from WXOLG.
- Line width for both warnings and watches is now configurable. The default is 2, higher values lead to a thicker line. Considering 3 or 4 as a potential future default value.
- In all settings activities if you tap the label text for a setting it will now pop-up a dialogue with more information on the setting. Help content is in place but still a work in progress.
- In the US weather alerts viewer ( MISC tab, left column, 2nd row ) tornado warning text now uses the same color as tornado warning/watches in WXOLG and configurable under settings -> Colors.
- Source code files for New Zeland have now been removed ( disabled in prior version ).

Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions on this new functionality.

thanks,
Josh
 
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