Weatherlutionary: Pocket Weather HD 2.0
We’re stoked to announce that our shiny new Pocket Weather HD 2.0 update has been approved by Apple. What’s new? Retina graphics. That’s what.
Pocket Weather HD looks absolutely stunning on the new iPad’s retina display. The high resolution Sky and Dark themes look so good, you’ll want to show off the weather to your friends.
… And show it off to your friends you should, because Pocket Weather HD only utilises trusted weather data from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.
Pocket Weather HD is still the best way to check Australia’s weather conditions on your iPad. This version contains all the best features from the iPhone, enhanced and tweaked to look great on your iPad.
Get it from the app store today!
Pocket Weather AU 2.0 Part 4 (Final)
It’s the last day of the week (yay!) and the last update about the features coming in Pocket Weather AU 2.0. Today we cover some more mundane (but very important) tweaks:
- Tweaks to all of the skins, including skinning of the location list screen
- 3 new icons for heavy rain, fog and wind.
- Realtime UV support for some locations (from ARPANSA, more coming later)
- Radar updates improved to always get the most recent radars
- Option to disable rotation (eg: portrait only mode)
- Option to disable load on startup (useful for iPod touches)
- Many more bug fixes and server tweaks (there are literally too many to mention here, we re-wrote a large chunk of the code).
So what next you say? Rest we say! Then it’s straight on to the Pocket Weather World v1.1 upgrade!
Our designer also wants to completely overhaul Pocket Weather…but that’s a story for another day 
Version 1.5 is now available in the App Store
Apple finally approved version 1.5 of Pocket Weather AU yesterday, so go grab it and let us know what you think. The main features included are:
- The Settings have been moved into the application. Since the emails we keep getting seem to indicate that most people didn’t know they existed, they should now be a lot easier to find. Thanks go to the guys from the IconFactory for publishing a very nice library that helped us do this very easily.
- Animated icons are now available (you can turn them on from the settings mentioned above)
- We added the backup Melbourne Airport radar, since the main one in Melbourne is still having problems.
- We also tweaked the application loading time, and response time in a few of the screens.
We hope you like it, and we hope to bring you many more free updates in the future. We’re still deciding on the features of 1.6 but we already have a few like custom naming of locations, adding tide offsets to the tide display, the ability to cache tides so you can view them offline and a setting for locking the screen rotation for those of you that only want to see it in landscape or portrait. Feel free to leave comments with any additional features you want, or email us at support@shiftyjelly.com.
In other news we’re still working away in the background on a few other projects, which we hope to release weeks ago, but such is life, we’re going to hold onto them until they are fully baked and ready to go.
Is It Raining In Melbourne?
Some quick updates for you, starting with the main Melbourne Rain Radar. It went offline about 72 hours ago, and at the time of writing this is still not back up. This means that those of you living in Melbourne will not be able to access the rain radar from Pocket Weather (or the BOM site for that matter). We have implemented the changes required to incorporate the backup Melbourne Airport Radar into our application, and will submit that as an update to the App Store shortly. I wouldn’t hold my breath on seeing it anytime soon, as Apple are frantically testing thousands of applications that have been submitted to comply with the new 3.0 firmware update at the moment. At least you can sleep soundly knowing that once the update comes out, you will never have to go outside to find out if it’s actually raining or not!
We also have one other cool feature that we are testing for the next release, which we’ll keep a secret until it actually comes out.
Pocket Weather AU 1.4.1 Now Available
Just a quick post to let you know that Pocket Weather AU 1.4.1 is now available. It fixes some weirdness and crashing that can happen if you keep opening the radar, and should also fix the issue where you couldn’t play music/listen to podcasts while checking the radar. We also tweaked the look of the days being displayed in the High Visibility skin so that the day name stands out a bit more.
Thanks go to Alex S and the fine people at Mactalk Australia for identifying and helping to diagnose the issues:
http://forums.mactalk.com.au/39/51328-iphone-weather-app-data-bom-pocket-weather-11.html#post783498
So go grab the new release, and if you like it please leave us some feedback on iTunes. Unfortunately for every new release the feedback gets (effectively) wiped and we are at the mercy of the first few people that leave reviews! There’s at least one Troll who has decided that it’s their personal mission in life to leave us one star reviews that say nothing about the application but just criticise me personally instead. At the same time they leave glowing reviews for Oz Weather. I doubt that it’s Graham himself, but you get people like this sometimes, it’s just par for the course. Perhaps they have self-esteem issues, perhaps they just have no life, either way I just feel sorry for anyone that gets enjoyment out of doing that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind people leaving one star reviews if they hate our application and say why, more power to them. It’s my intention not to feed the trolls and just trust that you guys, our loyal fans, will leave us a few positive reviews 
Quick Post: Observation Overlay
Just a quick post for today. We had a question sent to us via email about what the blue arrow and associated numbers mean on the rain radar:
rain radar
- Green number : rainfall for that area in mm since 9am this morning
- Red number: current temperature in celcius
- Blue number: wind speed
- Blue Arrow: wind direction
You can turn this overlay off in the Settings application of your iPhone if you find it annoying.
And who says that you don’t learn something new every day?
