AndroidGuys

One of the applications that gained a little bit of pre-challenge exposure was HandWx. We saw it pop up on more than a few tech sites and almost all were unanimously excited for it. To be honest, it looked to us like an official offering from NOAA, it was that polished. We were able to speak with the developer behind HandWx, Roland Schweitzer. Read on to find out more about the app and how it works, including the source of all of the weather information.

We have seen weather apps for Android from other developers and even a few from the semi-finals. How does HandWx differ from them?

I’ve seen screen shots of some other weather applications. A few of them look quite elegant, but I have not run any of them so I don’t think it would be fair to make comparisons.

HandWx does a few things very, very well. It will get a forecast for your current location and makes it easy to get a forecast for anyplace else in the country by lat/lon, zip code, and city, state with or without a street address. The coolest thing about the application is the display of radar data. The data which is produced by our weather data partner, Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. is quite spectacular. They produce a new tile mosaic of radar images that covers the entire United States every 5 minutes.

The radar images are processed so they are “clean” and free of ground clutter. The data is served by a Google Maps compatible tile server at 8 different zoom levels. At the most zoomed-out, the entire continental United States is visible and at the most zoomed-in, very detailed radar is available for an area the size of a few city blocks. HandWx puts all that at your finger tips overlaid on the Google Maps interface of the phone.

You can pan and zoom around at will and when you find something interesting you can run a time loop to see the recent path of the storm, you can get updates to the latest images automatically every five minutes, and you can also have the application follow your location and update the radar as you go. If you’ve ever driven across Wyoming in the dead of winter you can imagine how nice it would be to zoom the map out to see if the snow flurries you’re in right now are dumping big snow 20 miles up the road

Tell us a little bit about the source of your weather data, Weather Decision Technologies, Inc.

The forecasts come from the United States Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service from their National Digital Forecast Database (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ndfd/). I know that’s a mouthful, but I feel obligated to note the full pedigree of the National Weather Service. NOAA is one of the federal agencies that in my view don’t get enough credit for what they do. A great deal of the weather information we consume daily originates from NOAA and its operational and research line offices.

The radar data are produced by Weather Decision Technologies, Inc (www.wdtinc.com). It’s a bit repetitive of what I said above, but here’s the marketing blurb — WDT produces the highest spatial resolution (1km) and temporal resolution (2 minute) national United States radar mosaic available. Using the Integrated Radar Data services from the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, which provides a low-latency streaming data feed of all 136 Level II NEXRAD National Weather Service radars, and using cutting edge quality control and merging techniques our partner produces an extremely accurate and timely picture of the current radar as Google maps compatible tiles (which are updated every 5 minutes).

There’s definitely a lot going on there! Let’s talk about writing HandWx for a moment. Did you face any obstacles working with the Android SDK, and if so, what where they?

There were the usual issues with the mock location providers and mock geo-coding that everybody else has mentioned. I know a lot of folks decided to implement their own location providers, but I did not, even though the default trip didn’t make a very compelling demonstration of the “follow-me” aspects of the radar display.

I also implemented an interface where you could enter any city, state pair with or without an address and the application would use Google’s geo-coding to determine a zip code or lat/lon position and HandWx would provide a forecast for that location. With the mock geo-coding as implemented in the SDK you could get a forecast for the White House by entering “1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC”, but any other address didn’t work.

I never found a generic slider widget which would have been nice for a couple of things. The map zoom has a slider, but it was pretty specific to the map.

But these are just minor quibbles with a rapidly maturing SDK. I did spend a lot of time building a custom display for paging through the forecast information using the XML View descriptions and my own buttons and whatnot. In the end I went back to the ListAdapter and the final product was much cleaner and easier to use than the thing I built myself. I learned a valuable lesson about the benefits of doing things “the Android way”.

The program sounds like it might require a hefty set of specs. Any idea as to what the minimum requirements to run Hand Wx will be - Processor speed, memory, network speed?

We still have some work to do to determine those minimum requirements. There are things you can play with in the emulator, but there’s no substitute for some actual benchmarks on real hardware. The OHSA has indicated that some of the Google API’s will not be available on all phones and of course to get the most out of HandWx, you’ll need a phone that supports the Maps API.

How many different locations will a user be able to track or “bookmark” on their handset?

We didn’t build a bookmarking interface because it’s so easy to call up a forecast for any location. It’s something we’re considering for the future, but we didn’t get it in to the version for Round 1.

Will your program also provide users with information such as barometric pressure or pollen count?

We aren’t actually providing any current conditions (only forecasts — which has the potential to include predictions for some 42 parameters, but pressure isn’t among them). We might add current conditions, but for now we’re concentrating on location based now-casts and forecasts particularly of storms and hazardous weather. We have access to adding hurricane information and alerts, tropical storms, tornadoes, moon phases, you name it. The possibilities are endless.

Will this be an application that requires users to pay a subscription?

There are a number of different business models we are looking at right now. Subscription is one of them, but different customers will likely have different approaches to the “personal location-based weather” consumer value proposition, which we think is really strong. Some not insignificant infrastructure is required to produce and serve these radar data and other data we’ll be adding.

Have you looked ahead as to how your program will be distributed?

Our partners have a great deal of infrastructure in place for distribution of their data products and software that supports them, so it’s likely they will also take on the distribution of this application, but we have not ruled out participating in other distribution channels.

To generate revenue, will HandWx be ad based?

We haven’t ruled anything out at this point.

Have you been contacted by any carriers that want to feature your app on their network?

We are talking to lots of potential partners and customers.

Do you see HandWx running on different platforms in the future? For instance, Symbian or iPhone?

Weather information is universally attractive. We haven’t ruled anything in or out.

Well, it looks like a great program and we’re all anxious to see it working on a handset. Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions! Don’t hesitate to stop back and share any new developments or announcement.