Hi,
It’ll be great to set a condition like:
-3 hours before,
-Wind blowing from east
-&
-Speed > 30 m/s
=> Give me a notification named “close the windows” (it’ll be dusty)
It can be used for many things:
wind speed > x then close the garden umbrella
UV > y then wear sun glasses or cream…
It can make a report presented in a widget
This will maximize the app’s utility
Hi,
This is exactly what I want to do - a notification editor.
It’s a bit more complex than what you describe. We need to consider:
My main limitation is time. There are so many things on the todo list.
Cheers, Duane.
If users can post what notifications they would like, ie., the criteria, then we can come up with a generic way to meet all needs.
The other thing to consider is the range, e.g., exact location or within 50km radius. This is important for anticipating rain.
I’m guessing that the most wanted one will be:
Warn me if is risk for:
I would like to be notified for times when the sky is clear, and the sun is up.
(I. e. when is it a good time to go out and get some vitamin D from the sun.)
Another awesome combo of criterias (especially for photographers) are:
Notefy me when there are no clouds closer than
in the direction of the sun, at sunset.
(And same for sunrise, and also both for the moon…)
Second that
Hi @tiwag, @Ohan Those are high-level wants. I want to know how you might specify a notification. For example, have something like:
@Ohan, your clouds might be, alert if clouds between 50km and 100km to the east is greater than 50% between 3pm and 7pm daily. Which you can see if a very complex notification to build into a generic notification editor. It might not be implemented immediately but the design of the notification system can incorporate it in the future.
I can’t manually program these notifications into the app since it will cause headaches since every user will want slight modifications to existing notification which will lead to a explosion of variations. This happened when I initially did graphs and is also why you can edit the values now.
I don’t need an explicit warning as notification but I would like it, if I could set a limit for temperature and wind force, where the colour of the graph changes and an editor for these limits.
Just to be warned when I check the weather widget
OK, I get your question.
For me this seams like one of those things that no matter how much you try to think about how you want it before you get it, it will change once you start to try to use it.
It will probably need to start with some basig guess, (like the ones you described as examples), and then evolve somehow organically.
hi…add significant snow is on the way!
I don’t think this is true and it counter to software development. Most software projects define specifications before starting. If you can’t describe what you want in words, I’m not sure we can randomly throw far more time trying to program something.
This is probably why I haven’t started it yet. I don’t really want to start an “organic” feature when others are not complete.
I might of mentioned this before but before Flowx I had several weather apps with announcements on to test them I found them annoying 
always going off large amount of time what they were supposed to be announcing didn’t happen just gave an idea of what might happen Then I found Flowx where you can scroll through the day and get all the info needed 
no constant pinging, ringing, dinging for the same thing over and over. but then again I’m a weather geek and use Flowx no less than 12+ times per day and when possible weather events or events that are weather dependent Flowx stays open
Yes this is probably true. And it is so in order for developers/programmers to be able to get anything done.
I think that the “Notyfy upon specific condition”-feature is one that seam fairly simple to state, but actually is far more complex to get “right” or useful without being
, than what is easy to imagine.
…
There is ways to deal with this type of situations, but they are not always fast or cheap, and
it seams to me that working on other features is giving more value per spent time for Flowx at this time.
This is the true power of Flowx.
the reason why I said annoying is I live in a micro climate area so I get constant alerts and the storm splits and goes around. for example the last storm NWS app kept alerting for snow at my house we got a very light dusting however the north end of town got 4in. same when possible rain. at other times no alert and I get the heavy part of the storm and the Northern part gets little. not in anyway saying alerts are not useful as they very well be helpful to others. screen shots here show how some storms just go around me
Regarding design specification. It’s not just " in order for developers/programmers to be able to get anything done.". More importantly, it’s so you don’t months doing the wrong thing.
As such, I don’t want to start this notification feature without a good understanding of what people will use it for. If you can’t describe what you want to use it for, how am I able to design it, except for a basic system??
If I implement a basic system, the doors will flood open (I know from history) with users asking for notification A but only when C is below X. I will hack a few of these in and then find, I’ll have to rewrite the whole notification system.
For example, I designed the first graph system. Then users wanted “Q” with “G” but not “F”. I started doing a few of these and then rewrote and added the graph editor. The graphs were never designed for multiple sources or other data types, e.g., UV. Just your standard weather sources. So now I’m rewriting them to cope with other data types.
All I’m asking for are descriptions, like, I would like to know when wind is below 10knots and humidity is above 60% and there is a low chance of rain which is ideal plant spraying conditions. Check once a day (at 6pm) for the next 5 days range.
Or, if there is 20+mm of rain each day for the next 5 days which is ideal planting conditions. Check once a day (at 6pm) for the next 5 days range.
These two I made up from a email from a user I read a while ago and from my need to some planting.
It’s not too hard compared to the amount of work that goes into developing the feature. And the advantage is that you’ll have a notification system that works for you on the first go, instead of a frustrating system and a frustrated developer hearing all the conditions for notifications that should’ve been implemented.
I feel your frustration.
(Iterative products and systems development is what I do for a living.)
My point is that I’dont think it’s possible to “come up with a generic way to meet all needs” on the first try for a “notification editor”.
I do believe an iterative approach is needed to get this one right.
What I’m saying is that if you are not prepared for “the doors to flood open”, then it’s not the right time to start with this feature.
Notifications are a vastly different domain than displaying data in graphs and on maps, and users will react in a different way to it.
I agree that the first iteration won’t meet all needs - this is not my frustration. My frustration is that I asked for specific notification descriptions and I haven’t got many or enough. I made up two from a help email and my own gardening needs. So I don’t think we’ve got anywhere need the 80/20 rule, i.e., 80% of the notifications designs from 20% of the work.
This makes me think this isn’t really a big feature many want. It reminds me of when I spent 3 weeks implementing a solar eclipse path (with cloud cover) and only a few people used it. I’ve since removed the data.
Based on what we have so far, I get the feeling I could spend weeks on this, get a rubbish notification design, throw it all out and start again, except I won’t have time to start again. This kind-of doesn’t inspire me to start it. I won’t start a half-baked feature.
So I’ll wait until I’ve got a good design from a range of notification ideas from help emails and mulling it over in my head before I start it.
Yep, I think so too.
Sonds reasonable!
(First time poster)
Love the app. I was a Dark Sky user on Android and now I use FlowX daily and often. Dark Sky had a “simple” feature which was a push notification when a simple condition is met. By simple, I mean location is local, metric is singular [in my case UV], and trigger was time only iirc. So each day I would get a notification about when the UV of 4 (point at which I must wear sunscreen). I had another where temp was predicted to be 70 (at which point, I close the windows). I’d leave the notification active on my phone until one or both conditions were attended to and then swipe. During the winter, sometimes I would receive neither notification but in spring they would start up.
I’d pay Gold sub/year for that. If it already exists, I’m IN! 
Thanks for all your hard work.