We recently added a home screen widget to our weather app, WeatherGraph!

[j-a-x]

I know we are a bit behind the curve. iOS 14 has been out for nearly a month now, and we finally released an update to our app that includes a home screen widget. We missed all of the blog posts and lists of apps including widgets, but I thought you guys might be interested to check it out so I thought I would post it here.

WeatherGraph is a weather app that displays forecasts from the National Weather Service (US Only) in a unique graphical format. I personally find it very useful and I hope you guys do too. I am looking forward to hearing some feedback.

WeatherGraph: Visual Forecasts App - App Store

Download WeatherGraph: Visual Forecasts by Catspaw Systems LLC on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like…

apps.apple.com

 

[ucfgrad93]

Looks nice, thanks for sharing.

 

[BigMcGuire]

You actually pull your data from weather.gov! I've always wondered why these other weather applications don't just do the same thing. I would pay $ for an app that just pulls weather data from weather.gov (NWS - NOAA).


Comments: It wasn't apparent to me that I needed to add a city for the widget to start working (may have been affected by location permissions failing (below)). I eventually figured out I had to hit the +.

The app asks for location permissions and poof, the location permission window disappears instantly. Have to be quick to get it. (Going to settings and back makes the permissions request re-appear) lol. Once I got the location approved, all was good.


I love the app! I'm a huge data graph / weather data hobbyist. Would love to be able to save that graph somewhere and see a history of it over time (swiping back and forth, save to a PDF, etc?

Does it cost you $ to pull weather data from NWS?

-- Purchased the $3.99 even though I didn't see any ads. Thank you!

 

[j-a-x]

Thanks so much

You actually pull your data from weather.gov! I've always wondered why these other weather applications don't just do the same thing. I would pay $ for an app that just pulls weather data from weather.gov (NWS - NOAA).


Comments: It wasn't apparent to me that I needed to add a city for the widget to start working (may have been affected by location permissions failing (below)). I eventually figured out I had to hit the +.

The app asks for location permissions and poof, the location permission window disappears instantly. Have to be quick to get it. (Going to settings and back makes the permissions request re-appear) lol. Once I got the location approved, all was good.


I love the app! I'm a huge data graph / weather data hobbyist. Would love to be able to save that graph somewhere and see a history of it over time (swiping back and forth, save to a PDF, etc?

Does it cost you $ to pull weather data from NWS?

-- Purchased the $3.99 even though I didn't see any ads. Thank you!

Thanks so much!! Interesting that you didn't see any data on the widget until you added a location. The first time I tried to submit this version, Apple rejected it saying that the widget had no content. I assume the reviewed was just too lazy to type in a city and maybe disabled location services, so I resubmitted with "Cupertino" as the default location and Apple approved. In my testing everything seemed to be working fine (if you didn't manually add a location you'd at least see the weather in Cupertino). Did Cupertino pop up for you?

It's actually free to use the NWS API but it's a bit more of a headache than other weather data providers as unfortunately NOAA's data systems aren't the most stable. It's usually fine but it suffers from more downtime and undocumented changes than other APIs so I try to stay on my toes and keep it up to date since I use it myself.

Weird about the permissions window disappearing too. I haven't seen that one yet. I probably need to do more testing but as a 2-person dev team (and both of us are very busy with day jobs) it's hard to be 100% sure everything is working. I apologize for the lack of polish, but what we lack in polish at times we make up for in quick updates.

Thanks for your purchase and glad you find it useful! I personally prefer weather.gov to all of the other data sources out there, and I personally prefer graphs to tabular forecasts so that's why I created this app.

Jax

 

[Paco II]

Just installed. I didn't see any data but did see the spinner. Took about 30 seconds and then current location and Cupertino appeared.

 

[j-a-x]

Just installed. I didn't see any data but did see the spinner. Took about 30 seconds and then current location and Cupertino appeared.

Good to hear. NOAA’s servers can be slow u fortunately. I’m 90% sure that’s why it took so long but glad it eventually appeared.

 

[C DM]

Good to hear. NOAA’s servers can be slow u fortunately. I’m 90% sure that’s why it took so long but glad it eventually appeared.

When it comes to the widget, how often is the data updated? I installed the app earlier today and visiting the widget now it seems to show a time of 4 hr, 27 min at the bottom of it, which I'm guessing is when the last update was (the current temperature that is being displayed at the top of the widget seems to support that as it's about 8 degrees cooler than the actual current temperature).

 

[BigMcGuire]

Thanks so much


Thanks so much!! Interesting that you didn't see any data on the widget until you added a location. The first time I tried to submit this version, Apple rejected it saying that the widget had no content. I assume the reviewed was just too lazy to type in a city and maybe disabled location services, so I resubmitted with "Cupertino" as the default location and Apple approved. In my testing everything seemed to be working fine (if you didn't manually add a location you'd at least see the weather in Cupertino). Did Cupertino pop up for you?

It's actually free to use the NWS API but it's a bit more of a headache than other weather data providers as unfortunately NOAA's data systems aren't the most stable. It's usually fine but it suffers from more downtime and undocumented changes than other APIs so I try to stay on my toes and keep it up to date since I use it myself.

Weird about the permissions window disappearing too. I haven't seen that one yet. I probably need to do more testing but as a 2-person dev team (and both of us are very busy with day jobs) it's hard to be 100% sure everything is working. I apologize for the lack of polish, but what we lack in polish at times we make up for in quick updates.

Thanks for your purchase and glad you find it useful! I personally prefer weather.gov to all of the other data sources out there, and I personally prefer graphs to tabular forecasts so that's why I created this app.

Jax

Thanks for the reply! No apology needed. Love apps like this. Happy to support a developer - especially one on Macrumors.

Cupertino didn't pop up automatically but once I got the permission window approved, I got my current location added again (to the one I added manually). So all good.

Glad to hear about the cost - I'd feel bad running this app knowing it was costing something every time I used it, lol.

Been working great - like you said NWS is a little slow but eventually it updates - I'm going to get a lot of use out of this app!

I just figured out you can click on the location (or the widget) to get a bigger graph and more info.

LOVE IT.

Thanks!

 

[BigMcGuire]

Thanks so much


Thanks so much!! Interesting that you didn't see any data on the widget until you added a location. The first time I tried to submit this version, Apple rejected it saying that the widget had no content. I assume the reviewed was just too lazy to type in a city and maybe disabled location services, so I resubmitted with "Cupertino" as the default location and Apple approved. In my testing everything seemed to be working fine (if you didn't manually add a location you'd at least see the weather in Cupertino). Did Cupertino pop up for you?

It's actually free to use the NWS API but it's a bit more of a headache than other weather data providers as unfortunately NOAA's data systems aren't the most stable. It's usually fine but it suffers from more downtime and undocumented changes than other APIs so I try to stay on my toes and keep it up to date since I use it myself.

Weird about the permissions window disappearing too. I haven't seen that one yet. I probably need to do more testing but as a 2-person dev team (and both of us are very busy with day jobs) it's hard to be 100% sure everything is working. I apologize for the lack of polish, but what we lack in polish at times we make up for in quick updates.

Thanks for your purchase and glad you find it useful! I personally prefer weather.gov to all of the other data sources out there, and I personally prefer graphs to tabular forecasts so that's why I created this app.

Jax

I just ran it on my iPad 11 Pro. I saw Cupertino and the permissions for location didn’t disappear - it stayed and everything worked fine. Heh - as a programmer, I hear you lol.

App works beautifully on my iPad and my iPhone.

Thanks again

 

[j-a-x]

When it comes to the widget, how often is the data updated? I installed the app earlier today and visiting the widget now it seems to show a time of 4 hr, 27 min at the bottom of it, which I'm guessing is when the last update was (the current temperature that is being displayed at the top of the widget seems to support that as it's about 8 degrees cooler than the actual current temperature).

Sorry for the late reply, crazy day yesterday.

So the widget will try to update when it thinks the NWS API will have new data. NWS has new data about every hour, so if an observation is 15 minutes old, it won't try to refresh for another 45 minutes. Now there's no guarantee NWS will have no new data. Sometimes the NWS API is a bit delayed and data comes in later than expected. There's also no guarantee that the widget will refresh as often as you ask it to. You can only request that the OS refresh it and then depending on system resources it may or may not happen.

I thought displaying the time since the last observation in the widget was useful as it would at least let you know how to date the data is. Not many others widgets do this but a few others do like Robin Hood.

 

[C DM]

Sorry for the late reply, crazy day yesterday.

So the widget will try to update when it thinks the NWS API will have new data. NWS has new data about every hour, so if an observation is 15 minutes old, it won't try to refresh for another 45 minutes. Now there's no guarantee NWS will have no new data. Sometimes the NWS API is a bit delayed and data comes in later than expected. There's also no guarantee that the widget will refresh as often as you ask it to. You can only request that the OS refresh it and then depending on system resources it may or may not happen.

I thought displaying the time since the last observation in the widget was useful as it would at least let you know how to date the data is. Not many others widgets do this but a few others do like Robin Hood.

Thanks for the reply. Strangely my widget doesn't seem to be refreshing unless I open the app. Just now it was showing the last refresh time of 1 day, 6 hr with data from yesterday basically. Once I opened the app it updated almost immediately with data from 1 hr, 19 min. Does the app perhaps need to be running for updates to come in, or at least background refresh needs to be on for it?

 

[j-a-x]

Thanks for the reply. Strangely my widget doesn't seem to be refreshing unless I open the app. Just now it was showing the last refresh time of 1 day, 6 hr with data from yesterday basically. Once I opened the app it updated almost immediately with data from 1 hr, 19 min. Does the app perhaps need to be running for updates to come in, or at least background refresh needs to be on for it?

Background refresh helps, the app does use background app refresh. That said, I believe the widget refresh is independent of background refresh but I haven't actually tested whether background app refresh being off disables widget refresh. Can you turn it on and let me know what happens?

 

[C DM]

Background refresh helps, the app does use background app refresh. That said, I believe the widget refresh is independent of background refresh but I haven't actually tested whether background app refresh being off disables widget refresh. Can you turn it on and let me know what happens?

Yeah, from my experience, generally widgets are usually able to update even without the app really being opened or used recently, or background refresh being enabled. I generally have background refresh disabled completely as I don't really make use of it. But I'll see if I can turn it on just for the app to see if makes a difference over the next day or so.

 

[j-a-x]

I generally have background refresh disabled completely as I don't really make use of it. But I'll see if I can turn it on just for the app to see if makes a difference over the next day or so.

Thank you, that would be super helpful. You'll see a lot of times when it is over an hour since the last refresh but it shouldn't get too much over an hour. Currently I see 1 hour and 25 minutes but my battery is at 14% so that might be partially why (the system refreshes less often when your battery is low). Basically the time since refresh on the widget should match the time of the last observation in app if you click the "i" button. One thing I notice though is that it doesn't refresh at night and when I first check my phone in the morning sometimes it is a bit out of date until I start using my phone a bit which seems to trigger a refresh. Still learning about how it works...

 

[C DM]

Thank you, that would be super helpful. You'll see a lot of times when it is over an hour since the last refresh but it shouldn't get too much over an hour. Currently I see 1 hour and 25 minutes but my battery is at 14% so that might be partially why (the system refreshes less often when your battery is low). Basically the time since refresh on the widget should match the time of the last observation in app if you click the "i" button. One thing I notice though is that it doesn't refresh at night and when I first check my phone in the morning sometimes it is a bit out of date until I start using my phone a bit which seems to trigger a refresh. Still learning about how it works...

All good details to keep in mind as I'm observing it all here and there.

 

[C DM]

Thank you, that would be super helpful. You'll see a lot of times when it is over an hour since the last refresh but it shouldn't get too much over an hour. Currently I see 1 hour and 25 minutes but my battery is at 14% so that might be partially why (the system refreshes less often when your battery is low). Basically the time since refresh on the widget should match the time of the last observation in app if you click the "i" button. One thing I notice though is that it doesn't refresh at night and when I first check my phone in the morning sometimes it is a bit out of date until I start using my phone a bit which seems to trigger a refresh. Still learning about how it works...

Just wanted to follow up on my experience after I enabled background refresh. Keeping an eye on the app over a couple of days it seems that background refresh has helped a bit, but there have still been times when the time of the last refresh was more than about 9 hours or so. It looks like background refresh got things to update at least a couple of times a day, which was better than before, but still not that often. There was one or two occasions where I also received a forecast notification (which I enabled in the app) and that would also trigger an update for the widget as well.

Looks like there was an update that was recently released and I noticed that there's actually a "classic" widget that exists for the app now too (although perhaps it was there before and I just didn't notice it before). I actually switched over to using that one as it seems to update more frequently (since I believe that the "classic" widgets are allowed to do that) and even has a longer forecast visible.

 

[j-a-x]

Thanks for the follow up. The old style widget updates every time the widget is shown while the new style widget updates on its own schedule so that's one big difference. How are you using the new widget? Is it on your home screen? And is it on the first page? I have two different sizes of the widget on mine, one on the first page (the one I use every day to check the weather) and typically it's up to date within an hour or two, and then I have one on my last home screen page that I just use for testing and that one seems to update less frequently. I thought that was interesting. I'm not sure but it seem like the widgets on your first page will update more frequently.

Background app refreshes as well as app launches should both trigger widget updates but the widget can also call for updates manually if the data is stale based on the elapsed time since the last new data was received.

One thing that might cause data to be delayed (the 9 hours since refresh issue) is the API being down, which can happen for specific locations sometimes. Have you noticed that when the widget data is stale the app data is up to date? That would rule this out.

 

[C DM]

Thanks for the follow up. The old style widget updates every time the widget is shown while the new style widget updates on its own schedule so that's one big difference. How are you using the new widget? Is it on your home screen? And is it on the first page? I have two different sizes of the widget on mine, one on the first page (the one I use every day to check the weather) and typically it's up to date within an hour or two, and then I have one on my last home screen page that I just use for testing and that one seems to update less frequently. I thought that was interesting. I'm not sure but it seem like the widgets on your first page will update more frequently.

Background app refreshes as well as app launches should both trigger widget updates but the widget can also call for updates manually if the data is stale based on the elapsed time since the last new data was received.

One thing that might cause data to be delayed (the 9 hours since refresh issue) is the API being down, which can happen for specific locations sometimes. Have you noticed that when the widget data is stale the app data is up to date? That would rule this out.

Generally I've been using the medium sized widget on the Today View (widget) screen. I access that screen fairly regularly to check various widgets, although certainly not as often as I see my home page(s). However usually it seems that even if I access that screen multiple times the data doesn't seem to get updated most of the time -- for the most part it seems that actually launching the app will get the widget data updated (as it would usually get the latest data in the app) or it can happen when a forecast notification comes in.