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Apps CARROT Weather's customizable complications
- Thread starter MakerOfCARROT
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haha, there are thousands of lines of dialogue, and there's this big complicated system that goes into picking which line of dialogue to use when. There's dialogue for all the different possible weather conditions, the temperature, the season of year, and a whole bunch of random weather-related dialogue. With so many lines, some will find certain lines more entertaining than others 
Open the app on iPhone and then Settings (cog icon top right of main screen). If Premium is enabled, you'll see the expiry date.
any progress on multiple (small) complications yet? i exclusively use modular in the week but the large is taken up by the calendar complication and moving it elsewhere wouldn't work for me (i work in a school where it seems the classrooms were allocated by a random number generator, i have the directions to the class in the calendar event name so i know where i'm going) - but i'd like to see weather conditions and temperature AND precipitation chance all at the same time (i currently use the weather channel complication for the latter, and just have a world clock in the place i'd put the former). if you could have two different complications, i'd drop the money on this app and premium in a second.
that said, anyone who uses the app do you find the weather conditions forecasted accurate enough to not need precipitation chance (this is more important to me than anything here in china, it's almost always hot - so i need to know it's gonna rain or its not, and thats about it)? alternatively, where do you get your precipitation chance data from, if it's the same source as the weather channel i'd consider keeping their complication alongside yours...
that said, anyone who uses the app do you find the weather conditions forecasted accurate enough to not need precipitation chance (this is more important to me than anything here in china, it's almost always hot - so i need to know it's gonna rain or its not, and thats about it)? alternatively, where do you get your precipitation chance data from, if it's the same source as the weather channel i'd consider keeping their complication alongside yours...
Took the plunge and got this today having given up on Dark Sky. Really like the Apple Watch implementation - good work Mr MakerofCARROT!
It's a shame that Dark Sky seems to have given up on any further development of their app. Still, Carrot seems to have some great new features in the pipeline.
Dark Sky is still working for me on Watch, and weather warnings seem to be getting through again.
Oh it works on the watch, it just isn't accurate. I just got an update on the watch a few hrs ago about rain starting, but on the phone it shows no rain in forecast.
And it takes FOREVER to load.
Unfortunately, Apple didn’t intend for developers to offer multiple complications for the same app, so there’s no way for me to tell how many complications you have active at once on the app (which would be necessary for me to display one set of data in one complication and another set in another complication). The only way to distinguish between complications is based on the design template, and because the large and small slots use different templates, I’m able to show different data for each one.
What I am planning to add in the next update is a small complication that shows temperature on the first line in a color that represents the current condition (i.e. yellow for sunny, blue for rain), and then precipitation chance on the second line. Hoping to add that in the next beta.
I think it's time for MakerOfCARROTT to come clean, and tell us something about him/herself, and what kind of twisted personality comes up with a weather app with both attitude and a sense of humour
I think it's time for MakerOfCARROTT to come clean, and tell us something about him/herself, and what kind of twisted personality comes up with a weather app with both attitude and a sense of humour
CARROT's based mostly on my wife, my sister, and my mom.
These women in your life call you a meatbag? Lol.,,CARROT's based mostly on my wife, my sister, and my mom.
If this was the case we should all compile wifey jokes and this should make carrot weather a super hit!
Ahh I thought another user had said it was possible in an earlier post.
Well that would be a good complication!
Would hiding the chance of rain and making the weather complication bigger when 0% chance (or even under a threshold we could set?) be impossible at the moment?
Something like that might make sense, would just have to figure out whether that should be the default setting or let people toggle it on/off.
ok so...
how about one with the weather condition image above the chance of rain (i've never been bothered about temperature where i am now, it's always "too warm" anyway tbh)
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i'm also having a problem with current location in both the ios app and the watch app. it was forecast to rain today and still hasn't.
at 3:46 local time i took these two screenshots, alternating between picking the actual city from the list (sunny) and relying on current location (rainy) even though both say they are same city and current location. i got similar results on the watch app. in both cases, i switched back and forth back and forth waiting for the data to load, and kept getting the same result each time... it meant that the complication on the watch face was, to say the least, wildly inaccurate, as it showed rain when the current conditions (and forecast in some cases) was sun
after checking many many times with no change, at exactly 4.30 pm the two began to marry up. i noticed a similar problem last night where the two forecasts were different and then on the hour matched up - is the data actually being updated in real time when i refresh or checked against a pre-populated list on your server?
any tips? i love the app itself but the data in it doesn't seem to be so useful if it can't even agree on the temperature or conditions at my current location
Right, they're never going to match up exactly because they're all on different schedules in terms of when they're updating/caching their data. The iPhone will update pretty much every time you check it (its data cache lasts for 10 mins). The Apple Watch main app's cache lasts for ~30 mins (this is done so that data is ready for you to view almost as soon as you open the app without having to wait 10-30 seconds for new data to load - you can always use Force Touch to reload it). And the Apple Watch complication updates every 60 mins, for reasons I've outlined in past posts. If you load fresh data in one of the 3 contexts, it should update the other 2 contexts - though this won't necessarily happen instantly due to Bluetooth transfer times, etc.
That's very strange, it almost sounds like past data was getting "stuck" in your phone/watch. Were the times on the hourly chart updating throughout the day or were they staying the same? I'm not caching any data on my servers, though it's possible Forecast.io, my weather data service, was doing something along those lines.
Also note that Forecast.io's weather data is very localized, so it might display completely different weather conditions for someone in one part of a city versus someone in another part of the same city. So entering "Shenzhen" into the place search will return the weather for one static spot in the center of the city, whereas if you're using your current location then it'll return the weather for your exact location in the city - which could be miles away from the city center.
so if i reload data on the watch app it will make it's way to the complication? when you say it does it every 60 minutes, do you mean it will refresh automatically every 60 minutes, or will only refresh every 60 minutes no matter what?
i think my problems might be related to the forecast.io data. i use a couple of other weather apps still right now, the weather channel and another called my weather (i don't know whose data they use). none of the three marry up, but they seem quicker to react to the current weather conditions in my location (yesterday carrot weather told me it was raining for 3 hours straight when it didn't, by which time the weather channel had already put the chance of rain at 0% for the last 2 of those hours); checking the city data was more accurate to the conditions than "current location". does the forecast API let you break down the location, in the way the weather channel's app is telling me what part of the city i'm in right now?
how robust is the update process for the information on the watch? i opened the phone app, and the watch app and the weather showed a 5 degree difference between them. i force touched, updated on the watch, waited for the spinning wheel to go and no change. i waited a minute, did the same thing and then it matched up. is it possible it failed the first time and presented the old information instead of alerting me/trying again? [just repeated the process again and same thing happened. does the watch try to get data from the phone first before the server if it's been updated recently?]
Yes, if you reload the main Apple Watch app, it'll then show up on the complication. And yes, if the complication automatically refreshes its dataset every 60 minutes. It still shows the predicted temperature for every hour and half hour in the future, though, even without updating the dataset. (You can see this if you scroll the digital crown to activate time travel.)
The app uses Weather Underground's location database for location names (and accompanying GPS coordinates). I don't think you can search for specific neighborhoods/city areas in there, but I know in the US at least that you can search for zip codes and that works. Is there something similar to US zip codes that you could try for Chinese cities?
Not sure what's happening there, I'll look into this and see if I can figure out why it wasn't refreshing. I know the force touch refresh is on a short cache of ~5 minutes to prevent people from abusing it, but obviously the temperature shouldn't be changing 5 degrees in such a short span of time.
ok, when i was having those problems the complication didn't seem to update (maybe i was comparing it to the wrong data set though.
in comparison to the other weather complication i use, the weather channel rain forecast, their data goes as far as time travel allows (right up to the end of the following day) rather than ending around 23 hours away, although only hourly changes not half hourly like yours - is that a trade off you had to make, or something you could extend at some point?
i can't access weather underground for some reason, probably blocked by the great firewall, so i'm not sure what to check... i guess it doesn't matter too much, there's hardly room on the watch for the city name anyway
once i begin to trust the forecast.io data a bit more, i won't be too bothered about checking up on my "current location" and comparing it to the citywide forecast as much.PS i like the app a lot and when i switched faces back and forth earlier today, the data reloaded quickly, which made me happy!
in comparison to the other weather complication i use, the weather channel rain forecast, their data goes as far as time travel allows (right up to the end of the following day) rather than ending around 23 hours away, although only hourly changes not half hourly like yours - is that a trade off you had to make, or something you could extend at some point?
Yeah, each "entry" in the timeline takes up processing time on the watch, so you can only add so many before you get limited by the operating system. Having updates every 30m cuts back on the total number allowed.
From what I experienced, most of the time, the complication doesn't update after opening the main Apple Watch app. If the complication does update, it only updates the Temp/Condition and nothing else until after the complication itself is set to refresh itself.
I switched to using Beweather 2, the main Apple Watch app refreshes itself every time it's opened, but has a 5-10 minute cache where it doesn't. Each time the the Apple Watch app updates, the Complication also updates to match the data without fail every time.
Hmm, that's strange. The temperature and condition on the complication should always update when you open the main app. (Of course, you have to wait for the main app to reload its data before the complication will update - when you first open the main app, it'll be showing old data if the app was already open in the background.)