Weathrman 4.0: By Popular Demand

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I’ve got a shiny new Xoom, and now you have a shiny new Weathrman client.

The biggest changes here are all around two user stories I’ve heard more than anything else:

  • I installed the app, but it doesn’t do anything and I can’t find it.
  • I need more control over how the application uses data on my device.

To address the former, we’ve got a launcher, dialogs on preview, and an embedded usage guide to help the user get the live wallpaper selected on their devices.

To address the latter, we’ve now got a pretty good story on data controls:

  • We now obey background data settings. If you turn off background data support, you can still refresh the wallpaper manually, but all automated, non-interactive network activity is stopped.
  • Support for disabling use of 2G/3G and WiMAX networks, for those who want wifi-only.
  • Control over walllpaper refresh rate.

Now that we’re allowed a lot fewer search terms, we’re doing a lot more fan-out of requests to flickr; a single user can now result in about 5,000 flickr requests, fired off in under 30 seconds. The pressure is on to find better search terms and filter terms, and so our next steps will be to take advantage of the prediction API and start using machine learning to make better decisions.

Weathrman Search Quality: A Progress Report

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I’m in the process of doing some server-side results joining, to reduce the complexity of our queries.  The upside of this is that I should be able to, over time, bring us back up to our previous quality of searches.  In fact, we’ll actually be slightly better off - performing a series of decomposed searches will ultimately result in more search results to process, as we’re doing more queries and getting more results.

This mean the load on the flickr API - and the load on my server - are going up.

I’m still in the awful position of not being able to charge for this, having made it free once - so I still want this to fall within freebie quota if at all humanly possible.

Last, I’ve got a shiny new Xoom, and I’ll be spending some time on the client shortly getting some basic changes into the UI to make it slightly prettier when used there.  I’ve already made some server-side tweaks to broaden the minimum image size so that Xoom resolutions get more Flickr results.  The biggest problem at the moment is that there just aren’t many large image sizes fetchable via the API, and the images that do come back are far below the 1920x1408 background image size that a xoom wants.

More soon.