An update to Oz Weather – v1.2 – has just been approved by Apple and released to the app store.
This update provides many new options to cater for special interests and patterns of usage – for example nautical users can now have windspeeds in knots, and observation mavens (like myself) can now get the app to open showing the observations page first. Fortunately this has all been possible without interfering with the simple and clear user interface. 🙂
This update was submitted on 11th December, so approval took 5 days (including a weekend).
Summary of Changes
- New options which may be set via the iPhone’s home page under Settings / OzWeather
- – selectable units for temperature, windspeed, rainfall, pressure (metric, imperial, nautical)
– starting city option (last city / top city / list of cities)
– starting weather page option (forecast / observations)
– preload radar data (on / off)
– remember radar location changes (on / off) - Addition of Marburg radar (west of Brisbane)
- Several other minor fixes and enhancements
Explanation of New Options
To make changes to these options go to your iPhone’s Home Page and select the Settings icon. Then scroll down until you find the entry for “OzWeather“.
Startup Options
Open with
- Last selected city – this option (the default setting) was always in effect in previous versions. It causes the app to always re-open showing data for the same city you had last been viewing.
- City at top of list – when you edit the list of cities you can drag any selected city to the top, and typically you would put your home city there. The advantage of this option over the “last selected city” option is when you sometimes want to view weather in other cities than your own, but make sure it always start on your own
- List of cities – if you often look at weather in different cities, then you might prefer to have a quicker startup which takes you to the list of cities, ready for you to select one.
First View
- Forecast – this option (the default setting) was always in effect in previous versions. It shows you the forecast page first when the first city is selected/opened.
- Observations – this shows you the current observations page when the first city is selected/opened.
NB – This option only affects the first city weather view during an application session. For any subsequent cities you choose, the application remembers which type of view you last used.
Radar preloading
- On (faster) – this option (the default setting) was always in effect in previous versions. It causes radar images to load at the same time as the forecast and observations data, so that when you view the radar image, is has typically already finished loading. Unless you have very limited data download allowance, this is generally the preferred option.
- Off (less data) – this prevents radar images from loading until you actually choose to view them. This reduces your data download requirement, but introduces a delay before the images become available. This option might be useful if you don’t often view radar images and/or want to minimise the app data usage.
NB – A typical set of radar images for a city ranges from about 10kB to 40kB depending on how much rain activity is occurring.
Units
- Temperature – you can choose between Celsius (C) and Fahrenheit (F)
- Pressure – you can choose between hectoPascals (hPa) and inches of Mercury
- Rainfall – you can choose between millimeteres (mm) and inches
- Windspeed – you can choose kilometres per hour (km/h), metres per second (m/s), knots, miles per hour (mph)
NB – Sailors and others with nautical interests should choose knots for windspeed.
Radar Location
Remember changes
- ON – this option was always in effect in previous versions. When you change the radar location, that changed location is remembered by the app next time you select the radar for the same city. This is useful is when you want to make a permanent change to which radar to use for the a city.
- OFF – this is the new default option. It allows you to change radar locations without affecting the standard radar location for the current city, so next time you view weather for that city, the radar location won’t have changed.
NB – This option does not affect the radar range – only the radar location. Any changes you make to radar range are remembered for next time you view the radar for the same city.
Ajnaware's Weblog 
Hi Graham,
Nice work. I love the option to turn the radar loading off, because if we didn’t have our own BOM weather app (I’ll do you the courtesy of not pimping it again here), it would have stopped me from using yours (I only have a 50MB allowance on my iPhone 2g). The downer is that I’ll now have to remove that from our sales pitch…oh well.
Russell
Hi Russell. Thanks.
Actually I tested our respective apps usage – tried viewing weather for both Melbourne & Sydney in each app. With radar viewing included, Oz Weather used 76kB vs 73kB for Pocket Weather. With no radar viewing and Oz Weather preload option off, Oz Weather used 6kB vs 7kB for Pocket Weather. So even in the worst case scenario (radar preload on while not actually wanting to view the radar images), the difference was still only a factor of 10, and with several Oz Weather sessions each day for 2 cities, you’d still only run up 2MB usage per month.
For comparison I also tried a single use of the built-in Maps app to locate myself and zoom in on the map. That 30 second operation used 167kB – which makes weather data usage look pretty trivial – whether or not radar preloading is on!
2MB is very small, so in most cases I think you’re right, you’d just want to have it turned on for ease of use. The problem is the crazy amounts telcos charge for excess data. In the case of my plan if I go over my limit by 2MB that would equate to $30 (1.5c per KB sounds small, until you do the math).