Weather Balls - Weather data
· v4.0.2
About
This widget provides key weather information to decide whether it's a good day to get out and about doing your favourite activity based on 4 key factors (cloud cover, UV index, precipitation and humidity) in a set of 4 balls (and the bigger the ball the more extreme the weather!). For a given location it will display the weather balls and associated information, such as wind speed, temperature (including windchill) and sunrise/sunset for the next 24 hours. There is also a wind (green) arrow which move around the edge of the display and scale to denote direction and strength.
The scales for the Weather Balls are as follows :
Cloud cover :
- orange less than 1/8
- white less than 4/8
- light grey less than 6/8
- dark grey greater than 6/8
uvIndex :
- green less than 3
- yellow less than 6
- orange less than 8
- red less than 10
- purple greater than 10
Precipitation (mm/h):
- green less than 2
- light blue less than 20
- dark blue grater than 20
Humidity (relative humidity %):
- green less than 75
- light blue less than 90
- dark blue greater than 90
The initial screen displayed is for the current hour (time block highlighted in red) and then you can scroll through the next 23 hour timeslots using the up/down buttons or swiping up/down. All of the data is sourced from Stormglass.io which is a pretty cool global weather API and in addition to the weather balls the following data is displayed :
- Wind : speed, gust and direction
- Temperature : base and windchill
- Daylight : sunrise and sunset
You can set 2 locations in the widget settings, my reasoning for this is that personally I want to know about conditions at a location I want to go to, rather than necessarily when I am already there. However it is also possible to use the GPS to get your current location if you want. To chose which location to use press the start/stop button (top right) or swipe left screen and it will take you into a view where you can choose which location to use (use up/down buttons or swipe up/down; use start/stop button or tap screen to select location...swiping right will exit without changing location). NOTE the GPS option will only turn green when your watch has a good fix and so may stay red (and so not selectable) if you are testing the widget indoors.
There are a number of other display options you can choose from :
- The colour scheme : you can choose between something a bit brighter and more colourful or keep it simple and more monochrome
- The display units : you can choose between imperial and metric
I am not a professional developer and I originally started this for as a personal project just for my own use but then decided to share it. If you like it then great, if you don't then that's fine too (just uninstall it). If you find any bugs or have any positive suggestions and feedback in a review as I'm always interested in ways to enhance it.
I would be particularly interested to hear from anyone in continental Europe on a different time zone to the UK to check whether the mapping between local and UTC times works in all scenarios and the parameters I've used to scale the weather balls work in more extreme weather scenarios.
What's new
Some minor tweaks