CTOForADay

Three more releases since I last posted; each picked up on small feature requests and things on my TODO list.

First, foremost, and most recent is the change to Flickr’s weather API.  Google’s is free-text, and there’s no clear listing of what, exactly, it returns.  Yahoo has a nice, clean API and a simple enumeration of possible conditions, making my life much, much easier when it comes matching conditions to an appropriate set of search terms.

Changes to the “about this image” view when you double-tap the screen now shows the weather conditions at the moment the image was gathered, which should help me diagnose when people see volcanos.  Also, the weather condition associated with a volcano is now “Imminent volcanic death”.  I look forward to seeing that bug report.

Last, there have been some changes to the way preview works.  People expect an instantaneous preview, but as of right now, the process of fetching an image is anything but instant; also, we use lots of data, and Flickr’s APIs are blocked by some carriers.  I’ve replaced preview with a carefully rendered view explaining these and other issues to users.

I’ve got some very positive feedback as of late, but as always, more is better.  I look forward to hearing from you.

I’m looking forward to getting some feedback.  It’s been… I think I opened the github account on the 28th of December.  I built and threw away a live background that ran cellular automata, which I really, really wanted to do, but Android’s drawing routines just aren’t good enough/fast enough to really allow for that.  (The automata itself was happily running at 15fps, but the UI update was <3.  Boo.

A commit on the 30th of December is really the beginning of this app’s life.  Today’s the 6th.  In that time, I’ve done more obsessing than I care to admit; I’ve had a really good time building this, and while it’s not perfect, I’m a great deal happier with the state of modern Android development than a year ago, and a good chunk of that happiness didn’t actually come until after I pulled Guice in as a dependency.  Shame that didn’t get built into a core part of the API, IMO, but I’m happy now.

I wanted to call this Weathr; that’s certainly the obvious thing.  Weathrman is just a bit too long for my taste.  But someone else appears to have had a similar idea, albeit for the web… it looks dead, but there’s no point risking it, and this does just as good a job.

I’m tracking exceptions and stuff to Analytics; I reeeeally wish there was a built-in exception logging API that pushed stack traces and bug reports back up to the marketplace.  Still, I’m looking forward to seeing how this works in the wild, and whether or not it’s an utterly broken experience in cities less populated than London.  I do my best to find local photos, but it will eventually do global searches…

I remain concerned over a few things.  I’d like to find some way to re-set myself as the active wallpaper if I’m the active live wallpaper and I update the binary.  If you know how to do that, ping me.  I hate the fact that every time I update this thing I have to go back to setting it as the current wallpaper again.

And I really ought to test this on a phone that isn’t a Nexus One.  Should you try this app on something other than an N1, do tell me what the experience was like.  Some things, methinks, won’t make sense - I should probably be more careful than I am, for example, about which image size I choose for download, rather than always assuming that bigger is better.

I look forward to hearing from you.