Random suggestions

[anotheryou]

First of all, thanks so much for this app! When weatherspark on the web was gone I really had no good alternative.

• yet to be loaded map tiles should be indicated visually. Right now I can’t see if some clouds are yet to load in or if it’s clear skies. Alternatively make the loading percentage a bit more present and have it include map tiles somehow.
• sleeper widget: only load widget after tapping it to conserve battery and data
• explain what happens to my silver subscription if I upgrade to gold. Will I basically loose what I already paid for in silver? That might hold people back from the upsale.
• easy way to look up weather at location without making it a permanent location in the menu
• I think high/low temperatures should be next to the temperature graph, maybe below it? (it that’s editable I’m just too stupid )
• let me re-order places in the menu by long-press and drag
• the tiny “more” menu bottom right is not intuitive. It only extra shows controls for the last thing you enabled. so enabling pollen e.g. you can’t toggle sun and moon any more.
• make graphs pinch-to-zoomable. If zoomed it needs to center the graph under the cursor however. Not sure how to keep controls intuitive.
• zooming out further would be so cool to see.

What I’d really love would be a way to hack in local university rain radars, but I wouldn’t really know how that could be done right. Usually you just get some gif without a transparent background and it wouldn’t be nice to hotlink it either…

and btw: can I offer to trade in a german translation for a gold sub ? I’m an IT guy and it’s fine if you just send me any i18n file.

[duane]

Hi @anotheryou,

These are all valid suggestions. There are two main constraints: my time and the priority of new features.

From experience, it’s important to identify which features are really important. Early on in Flowx, I pretty much added every feature a user requested and Flowx turned into a confusing mess both in UX and code. Since then I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible.

For example, “sleeper widget” - how important is this? is this really a big problem? does it justify adding an extra setting and extra code? will it lead to more support emails? e.g., if a user accidentally turns it on and doesn’t understand why the widget is not updating. How many users will use this feature?

The widget checks for new data every 30 minutes. Most checks download less than 1kB. There is generally one update every 6 hour, i.e., 4 times a day, where it would download less than 40kB and draw the graphs. I recently timed how long it took to load data and draw a graph and it was less than 100ms. The whole process takes less than a few seconds on a good network. To me, this looks efficient and you won’t save much battery by turning it off.

All new features need to be justified before they are added.

Here is a post on how features are generally prioritized..

Cheers, Duane.

[anotheryou]

woa, thanks for the long reply!

I 100% understand :).

[Ohan]

Hi @anotheryou and welcome to the forum!

In addition to Duane’s response I can say that I agree with some of your points, and have answers to some:

@anotheryou

yet to be loaded map tiles should be indicated visually. Right now I can’t see if some clouds are yet to load in or if it’s clear skies. Alternatively make the loading percentage a bit more present and have it include map tiles somehow.

To this (above) i say: I agree with that it seams walid at first, but give it some time and you’ll probably get a good feel for what is loaded and not, and think that the numbers counting down is in a good size. (fun fact: it is numbers of files left to download, not percent)

Making changes that draws you attention to any of the two things suggested, more than it does now, will be distracting once you gotten use to it.

@anotheryou

explain what happens to my silver subscription if I upgrade to gold. Will I basically loose what I already paid for in silver? That might hold people back from the upsale.

It’s clear on the homepage, but this info was apparently lost when the pro-version menue in the app was recently updated

https://flowx.io/help/pro-version/

Gold Subscription

This yearly subscription provides:

• Bronze and Silver features, plus:…

…

@anotheryou

easy way to look up weather at location without making it a permanent location in the menu

Yes please.
+1, on that.

@anotheryou

I think high/low temperatures should be next to the temperature graph, maybe below it? (it that’s editable

You can customize the graphs, (long-press on graph, edit graph) and choose yourself which one is showing temperature.
You can not (yet?) move the high/low temperatures.

@anotheryou

let me re-order places in the menu by long-press and drag

Menue > Editor > Places,
There you can!

@anotheryou

the tiny “more” menu bottom right is not intuitive. It only extra shows controls for the last thing you enabled. so enabling pollen e.g. you can’t toggle sun and moon any more.

Can explain this point of yours in a different way? It’s not clear to me what the problem is here. Preferably in a new topic.

@anotheryou

make graphs pinch-to-zoomable. If zoomed it needs to center the graph under the cursor however. Not sure how to keep controls intuitive.

This has been discussed before. If you search the forum you’ll probably find @duane 's comprehensive explanation of why this is a complex issue to solve in a smooth why. (it’s about downloading data on the fly, or knowing what data to download in order to maybe use it…)

@anotheryou

zooming out further would be so cool to see.

You can pinch-to-zoom out on the map to see the hole world. What else do you want to see?

If you want to discuss any of the above things in more detail, then please help keep the forum tidy by doing so in one separate topic per item.

Cheers!