Irish Weather app live on the App Store
I was bored three weekends ago and had an idea for a simple Irish weather app. Met Eireann have tons of great data available to the public, but finding the good stuff was a little fiddly. Anyway, after a weekend of work in Photoshop and Xcode, I had a pretty nice app. It was finally approved late last night. It’s free to download, so feel free to give it a spin.
January 04, 2010 at 3:51 PM
Hi Jason,
I've seen this app today - a guy downloaded it 2 days ago. It's very impressive. I immediately went to "free" download it but i see that it is now 1.59. In the notes however, it says that it's free while it's version 1.1 - 1.2 still hasn't been approved. Is it no longer possible to get this for free at this stage (pre 1.2 approval)?
January 06, 2010 at 11:13 AM
This is a great app and just got better with the new update. It would be nice to see the Irish sea in the rainfall radar so we can see what's coming from the East. Cheers, Colin.
January 06, 2010 at 8:20 PM
I downloaded this app and think it's great. Went to download it on my wife's iPhone but couln't find it on iTunes. Is it no longer available?
January 06, 2010 at 10:04 PM
@Paddy F, @Ken - due to a request by Met Eireann, I've removed the app from the AppStore temporarily. I hope to have the matter resolved shortly. The app will return to its original free status. I'll keep this post updated in the interim.
@Colin S - Thank you for the suggestion - it's something I will try to resolve for the next release.
January 12, 2010 at 11:57 AM
Hi,
Nice app! Although the icon is pretty gloomy and depressing. It'd be cool if the icon could change based on the current weather!
This morning I checked the app and it didnt load the most recent weather from met.ie. It was still showing yesterdays evening weather. No amount of relaunching or clicking the refresh icon helped. The radar and satellite images were uptodate.
I checked the mobile.met.ie site in Safari and it showed the correct report.
January 14, 2010 at 8:31 AM
Hi Jason,
Great idea, and great page design for the iPhone. I'm sure you've had tons of downloads with the recent weather we've been having.
Surprised it's for iPhone 3.1.2 only. I'll download it when I update, one of these months.
P.S. I thought your own web page http://www.jasonmadigan.com was broken, but it's just that the blue header takes up my whole screen. I'm sure I'm not the first.
January 18, 2010 at 1:12 PM
@h
Unfortunately, changing things in the app bundle (such as the icon) periodically is currently impossible for technical reasons (changing anything in the application bundle would invalidate the applications digital signature).
I'm aware that there are certain instances where forecasts may be delayed (for up to a maximum of an hour). Forecasts and other data sets retrieved by the application are cached for a time server side (on my API infrastructure side, not Met Eireann's). This is definitely something I'm going to look closely at for the next release, so thank you for mentioning it.
@Joe Williams
Currently I'm building against 3.1.2, mostly because of a bunch of developer API niceties. I know there are some older version holdouts but with 4.0 coming quite soon, I'm sure there will be lots more reasons to upgrade. As for the web-page, I guess it's possible that things are pretty broken for IE users. I should probably fix this, thanks for mentioning it!
January 24, 2010 at 7:49 PM
Jason,
Love the weather app. Totally loving it. Great job!
I have to disagree with some of the other comments, I really like your icon for this app. I'd love to do a similar icon myself for a couple of my apps but I'm brutal at photoshop (any tips?) ;)
Thanks again.
Finbarr
@finbarrbrady
January 25, 2010 at 9:44 AM
@Finbarr
Thank you for the kind words - I'm glad you like it. The icon has divided some people, but I quite like it. I might pop up a quick tutorial or something if I find some time, since the effect is pretty simple.
January 26, 2010 at 11:11 AM
Hi Jay.
Nice App. I'm a biker and myself and the GF use it A LOT! Thanks for making it free.
Anyway, did you have to ask met for permission to use their data or anything like that?
Mick.
January 26, 2010 at 12:06 PM
@Mick
Glad you like it. I've been in touch with Met Eireann throughout development, and they've been very nice to deal with. They seem to be open to the idea of people re-distributing their data - just so long as it's free, and they're properly attributed.
February 07, 2010 at 2:31 PM
love the weather app, met.ie site is woeful to navigate on an iphone, this sorts it right out
suggestion
i currently switch between met.ie (not any more with your app!) and the MagicSeaweed app for wind
can you add wind format from Magicseaweed.com
wind is best as a graphic with speed in mph/kn/km and an arrow for direction
maybe something to show Force using beauford scale too, MSW don't do that, but a lot of users would know for example what a Force 3 was, but not what 14km of wind feels like
February 09, 2010 at 4:00 PM
@Ashley,
Glad you like the app. I'll definitely take your suggestions into consideration for inclusion in a future release.
March 24, 2010 at 9:10 AM
Excellent app, I use it a lot. One request. Any possibility the rainfall radar could start with the latest image. Sometimes with a slow connection you have to wait a minute to get the latest, and it's the most important (will I need my umbrella). Thanks.
March 24, 2010 at 1:23 PM
@Conor
Excellent idea. Adding this to my to-do list.
April 26, 2010 at 11:50 AM
Hi Jason,
I really like the app, but has anyone else noticed that the "local" and "overview" pages don't tie in with the Met Eireann web site any more? I am not sure of the time difference, but based on the weather and temps it looks like they are out by a few days.
Maybe adding in a forcast timestamp would be a good idea, so you know how recent the updated forcast is?
Thanks,
GM.
May 29, 2010 at 1:24 PM
Hi Jason,
I was just wondering how you get the weather data. Do you scrape the met.ie website or do they have some sort of api?
Thanks.
Diarmuid.
May 31, 2010 at 12:29 PM
@Diarmuid
Unfortunately there's no API available from them, so I had to roll my own. Data is scraped from met.ie, popped into a local cache I host, and served to the app through a tiny Sinatra app I host.