A weather application on Android

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague and I decided to see what this whole Android craze was about. After all, if Microsoft dismisses it as:

It really sounds that they are getting a whole bunch of people together to build a phone and that's something we've been doing for five years

it can't be all bad, can it?

My colleague downloaded the Android toolkit for Java and the two of us banged up a client to this NWS web service. Took about an hour to have an application that would display a 6-hr forecast at the user's location (Even without a GPS chip, Android is capable of triangulating to get within 300m of the user's position, which is sufficient for weather applications ...). The whole process turned out to be as easy as pie ... although a professional effort would have to make the output be graphical instead of text. T., if you are reading this, perhaps you can post the code we banged out?

Our interest is, of course not in building a cell-phone application, but in serving our gridded nowcasts -- similar to how we currently serve out nowcast products over the entire country to Google Earth clients -- so that you can one day get personalized nowcasts on your Android-enabled phone.

3 comments:

  1. The Android application we at Shook Labs are creating will, in future releases, require weather forecasts. I think it would add a nice helpful touch to it. I'll take a look into the NWS web services you linked to. I'll also let you know if we decide to use it.

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  2. The code is far too ugly to post in it's current state (at least the parts that I wrote). I can probably upload the source someplace, however, after I clean it up a bit.

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