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I did some research about how people get weather info: http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ And out of
by sudonim 16y ago
I did some research about how people get weather info:
http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/ http://ianap.wufoo.com/reports/weather-report/
And out of that, I've been working on a simple weather app:
http://Dopplecast.com http://Dopplecast.com
It sends you a direct message via twitter every weekday morning at a time you specify.
My main goal is to learn how to build and deploy an app on rails. However I wanted to solve a real need I had too. I found that most people need information about the weather when they are getting dressed to go to work, so I wanted to give them a short sentence to glance at on their phone like this one I got at 8:15 this morning:
New York: Partly Cloudy 55 now | 61 low, 78 high. Isolated Thunderstorms today.
My initial goal was to get a text message so I can just look at my phone when I need to know, but that was too expensive to run as a service. Then I moved to @messages on twitter, but that was too noisy. Im now doing Direct messages. With an iPhone you get a push alert, and you can get twitter to text you direct messages. Double win.
If anyone uses it and wants to give feedback, I'm @alphacolin or @dopplecast on twitter.
The site is rough right now, but I solved the weather problem for me, and it's not an app. If it works for you too, let me know!
- spydez 16y agoDoes it tell you the chance of rain? I have a motorcycle; I only have one weather question in the morning - can I ride today? Rain is pretty much the only thing I care about, and I'm on the Florida coast, so "Isolated thunderstorms" is a "no shit, Sherlock" during spring/summer/fall and entirely useless. I want to know if it's the usual 10-30% chance of mid-afternoon rain, or if it's something more. An alert on my phone ready for me every morning would be ideal. I've found apps in the past that do it, but they always close shop after a few months.
- wensing 16y agoLikely out of your price range but Stormpulse will send you an email or text any time chance of rain exceeds a threshold of your choice. http://stormpulse.com/products http://stormpulse.com/products
- stevenbedrick 16y agoYes yes yes, please. I live in Oregon, and this time of year[1] pretty much every day is "chance of showers"- but some days that means "off and on, all day long" and other days that means "one or two good downpours, and decent the rest of the day". Trying to guess which it will be at 8:00 AM is a real pain in the neck. I've actually seriously considered trying to train a classifier to make "ride/don't ride" predictions based on the morning hourly forecast. The problem is that I know just enough about both weather and machine learning to know that such a simplistic approach probably wouldn't work very well. And, of course, the relative costs of false positives and false negatives are very different (false negative: I miss a good riding day; false positive: I get soaked and have to deal with slippery pavement).
- mccutchen 16y agoI love this idea, but why do you want permission to access and update my Twitter feed?