Here’s an idea - I’m up in Northumberland and have two place to visit, St Abbs, or Bamburgh, weather being the determinant. It’s clearly warmer and less cloudy if I travel little south, rather than north, so let’s go to Bamburgh - wouldn’t it be so slick and easy to be able to click on an option in Flowx that takes me straight to Google maps and starts up the navigation mode? I often check out weather before travelling, so I think that this would be a genuinely useful and unique feature to add to the app.
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Most emphatically DO NOT WANT.
This would require significant integration with Google and that’s a big risk for any app. (Look at the list of useful, popular apps that effectively ceased to exist when file access permissions mechanism changed in Android 10.) It’d also require some kind of destination list maintenance interface, which is a lot of work that has nothing to do with weather.
I’d much rather see time going into robustness; where I live, Flowx’s radar data is nothing like as reliable as it could be, for example. Lots of cool features is also lots of dreary maintenance, and some cycles going into that part would be very welcome from this corner.
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@beardypete the closest idea I have on the list to this is plotting a route in Flowx and the graphs would reflect the weather while you travel the route. This is a big job and so it’s way down the list.
@Oak does bring an important point to the conversation. It’s a balancing act between spending time on robustness and cutting edge. I feel Flowx is not as stable as I like but I also feel it’s not earning as much as I’d like :-). It’s a chicken and egg problem, with more revenue we can hire help to make it more stable.
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I feel guilty, a bit Oliver Twist-ish, lol! I’m totally naive when it comes to what’s involved in adding features - I thought that it was maybe just a matter of adding a line or two of code, whereas the reality reminds me of the aphorism, “a fool can ask a question that a wise man cannot answer”.
I use Flowx every day, often multiple times a day - in fact it’s probably my most used app after Google Chrome. Thanks again for your work @duane, I’ll continue to be a promoter at every opportunity.
Keep up the good work!
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@beardypete, don’t feel guilty. It’s the first time I’ve heard this idea. New ideas are rare these days.
That said, I’m just working on sharing movies and, you are nearly right, it’s only a dozen of lines to share the location to mapping apps. This could be added to the share feature but I’m not sure if it’ll work so that it shares an app link via emails and gps coordinates to map apps.
@Oak, I think you’re against solid integration of Google maps into Flowx - which I totally agree with. In fact, I’m trying to remove all Google Maps requirements, i.e., the name search for a new place. Would you be ok with the share feature?
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@duane I’m ok with a share feature so long as I can turn it off completely and centrally.
I get that weather is cool and people want to share weather imagery but my gut reaction is “threat surface increase”. Various weather data sources are a pretty small threat surface, and it’s being centrally handled; video sharing is not a small threat surface. I would probably have to think about it, rather than relying on flowx to know where it’s safe to get weather data.
But this is a personal call about what level of risk people feel comfortable with! it doesn’t have a general answer.
What I personally most want is for the app to work well even when connectivity is patchy. (the times I am most worried about being rained on/blown to Bermuda/frozen until spring I’m way outside somewhere looking at birds and connectivity is 2G fallback at best.) Anything that assumes or checks for a video sharing amount of connection/expects to use a video-sharing amount of connection strikes me as a risk; I might have to wait however long some network layer takes to give up on fetching the list of new videos before I can get a forecast update.
I’d really like to avoid that!
Which is not to say that I think movie sharing shouldn’t go in; my use cases are not all the use cases. I just want to be able make sure the feature never makes me wait out some kind of network timeout before I can get an updated forecast.
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Hi @Oak, I think you totally misunderstand sharing in Android.
There is not such thing as “turn it off completely” or “centrally”. Sharing is an “opt-in” thing. In other words, when you want to share something, e.g., a movie, Flowx will generate the movie, then ask you what app you want to use to share the video, e.g., Gmail. You choose to share, you choose what to generate, you choose how to share it.
BTW, Flowx has no idea how you shared the movie, e.g., what app you shared it with and who you sent it to.
Movie sharing has been in Flowx for over a year now and if you haven’t clicked the “Share” option int he menu and gone through the process, then you have shared zero movies.
Flowx doesn’t randomly share things for you.
Regarding connectivity: Flowx has an extensive downloading process with timeouts and requeueing for downloads. It will retry downloading something three times before giving up.
If you are on a patchy 2G connection and you’re trying to download 10MB of data while choosing to share a 5MB video, then there is absolutely nothing Flowx can do to improve your situation. Flowx could do something complex like P2P or seeing what data is missing, etc… but that would be asking too much.
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You’re entirely correct; I ditzed completely on what you were talking about.
I thought you were talking about a new feature to trade real-world weather imagery, which some weather apps do have.
Agree that mesh-network shennanigans, etc. would be far too much. (I have generally been impressed by how well flowx does if I remember to turn the radar off.)
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Actually, I just remembered something I’ve pondered for sailors which is to have a high resolution for tiles near the location but lower resolution for tiles further away. This would lower the downloads with little loss in understanding. But it does take a bit to code this up.
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