Is it Windy in Sydney?

Just a quick post for all of those people out there who have had our application before the recent 1.3 changes (eg: with the old icon) and live in the Sydney CBD. If you have ‘Sydney Airport’ selected as your observation location and are not getting any wind information, please delete the location and re-add it, and it will all work magically. Feel free to stop reading here if you don’t care why.

For the few of you that are insane, bored or need to know the answer to everything a la Gregory House MD, let me explain. Since version 1.0 of our application, we have always stored the default weather, observation and radar locations for each state in Pocket Weather itself. This meant that when you went to create a new location and chose your state, it would automatically pick the capital city for all of this data. This worked very well, except in Sydney where we picked ‘Olympic Park’ as the location, which happens to not support wind information. Yes I know, we’re idiots. We tried to fix this in 1.2, by changing it to ‘Sydney Airport’, but while we got the text right, we yet again managed to pick the wrong underlying code to get the Sydney data. In desperation we enabled a hack on the server that diverted all requests for Olympic Park to Sydney Airport instead. For the most part it worked brilliantly, and only two people ever emailed us asking what was wrong with Olympic Park. In 1.3 we fixed this once and for all, and removed the server-side hack. The problem is that people who are on 1.2 and upgrade to 1.3 who were using this hack, no longer had their Olympic Park data coming from Sydney Airport, and suddenly had no wind info. Sometimes backwards compatibility is hard…just ask Microsoft.

If you are still reading, you may want to check out this link: http://tinyurl.com/dfx9ve