WeatherÜ App - Weather App for Me and Ü (Production + Reflection)
The lockdown initiative made by the Malaysian government really made us bored, a lil bit empty and sad (because I never get separated this long from my family and cats, and cows) and also made me clueless about what to do since I am not a homebody.
One way to avoid loneliness and keep me busy so that I can distract myself from those feelings is by being productive doing something. And in this case, I collaborated with my friend, Alex Chan to build this weather app. And I can say that I really need to do this app, I was in a desperate need of a short gateway project from doing another complicated UI/UX project for my day job.
You know, working in an agency when one single project took more than 6 months, and it is the sole project that you're working on, you'll start to feel mundane. And you can't go out travel to refresh/reset your mind because of the Corona lockdown. That is when I decided, 'Yo, let's do this shit!'.
I like to illustrate. It kills time. It makes me happy.
As I told before in my blog posts, illustrating is my therapeutical hobby. But you can't do much with just illustrations unless you sell them online like what my friend did here. Currently, I don't think that I'll sell whatever I am having, because they are all personal to me. So, combine my acquired UI/UX skills with Alex's coding skills, we make something more useful, a weather app—although we were unsure who the hell will use weather app nowadays since every one of us commute by cars (such a privileged statement, yes). But WTV.
The first intention, make the app simple.
To begin with, me and Alex are never a power user of any weather app. To kick off the project, I started to download some weather apps on the Play Store. Most of the time, the apps look too complicated, too much info that I don't need even as a stereotype weather app user who just wants to know if it will rain today.
Our dream was small. We hope our friends will install it, maybe around 100 app downloads will do if we share this around on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (while writing this, around 355 downloads was recorded). Maybe people who use public transport will use it, who knows. That's why we made the app as simple as possible.
Next, make the app smooth.
Who wants to use a slow laggy shitty app on their awesome Android? We respect our phones. This is why we paid 100% focus on performance optimization. WeatherÜ is a native app, which means we only used Material Design components for this app. No excessive customization to ensure that our app can go as fast and lightweight as possible.
As you guys know, we are using the free weather API from OpenWeather and we also offer our app users multiple cities real-time weather forecast. To allow smooth and seamless calls from the app to the API in the background, we use Coroutine. It doesn’t map on the native thread, so it doesn’t require context switching on the processor, and yeah they are faster than Callback and RxJava.
Third, make the graphic anticipatable.
We don't have a lot to offer. So, we were having this thought–at least we can make something that will make people look forward to it? Instead of using too minimal background and just icons to convey the current weather. I painstakingly illustrate custom weather backgrounds. The backgrounds will change automatically based on the weather of the geo-location you are now in. Assumption: I hope they will like my illustration style.
Then we go publish it and 🤞 hope for the best.
Because we don't have high hope in prior (because expectation kills), we just release it sincerely to the Play Store. We hope we can get valuable feedback as a return. This is not our first built/developed app, but this our first app where we put a lot of effort into rich visualization + API integration! WTV. 🙄
It went well. 😲
Alex posted it on the r/androidapp subreddit at it got 30++ upvotes on the first day (now it scores 433 upvotes while I am writing this post). I posted it on Behance and it got 517 views. Okay lah. Everything is awesome when you have lesser expectations right? So, we waited for feedback and comments for us to learn and improve. So, down here I listed a few of the crucial insights we received.
What made us proud
What Aan learned
What Alex learned
What improvement we will do next.
✅ 24-Hour Format
✅ Dark Mode everyone wants
✅ Amend the repetitive search result bugs
☑️ Widget! (Wait for it)
One way to avoid loneliness and keep me busy so that I can distract myself from those feelings is by being productive doing something. And in this case, I collaborated with my friend, Alex Chan to build this weather app. And I can say that I really need to do this app, I was in a desperate need of a short gateway project from doing another complicated UI/UX project for my day job.
You know, working in an agency when one single project took more than 6 months, and it is the sole project that you're working on, you'll start to feel mundane. And you can't go out travel to refresh/reset your mind because of the Corona lockdown. That is when I decided, 'Yo, let's do this shit!'.
I like to illustrate. It kills time. It makes me happy.
As I told before in my blog posts, illustrating is my therapeutical hobby. But you can't do much with just illustrations unless you sell them online like what my friend did here. Currently, I don't think that I'll sell whatever I am having, because they are all personal to me. So, combine my acquired UI/UX skills with Alex's coding skills, we make something more useful, a weather app—although we were unsure who the hell will use weather app nowadays since every one of us commute by cars (such a privileged statement, yes). But WTV.
The first intention, make the app simple.
To begin with, me and Alex are never a power user of any weather app. To kick off the project, I started to download some weather apps on the Play Store. Most of the time, the apps look too complicated, too much info that I don't need even as a stereotype weather app user who just wants to know if it will rain today.
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| The working prototype of the app |
Our dream was small. We hope our friends will install it, maybe around 100 app downloads will do if we share this around on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (while writing this, around 355 downloads was recorded). Maybe people who use public transport will use it, who knows. That's why we made the app as simple as possible.
Who wants to use a slow laggy shitty app on their awesome Android? We respect our phones. This is why we paid 100% focus on performance optimization. WeatherÜ is a native app, which means we only used Material Design components for this app. No excessive customization to ensure that our app can go as fast and lightweight as possible.
 |
| Hackerman Alex is doing the codes while flexing his curved screen monitor. |
As you guys know, we are using the free weather API from OpenWeather and we also offer our app users multiple cities real-time weather forecast. To allow smooth and seamless calls from the app to the API in the background, we use Coroutine. It doesn’t map on the native thread, so it doesn’t require context switching on the processor, and yeah they are faster than Callback and RxJava.
We don't have a lot to offer. So, we were having this thought–at least we can make something that will make people look forward to it? Instead of using too minimal background and just icons to convey the current weather. I painstakingly illustrate custom weather backgrounds. The backgrounds will change automatically based on the weather of the geo-location you are now in. Assumption: I hope they will like my illustration style.
 |
| Me, working in the dark. Because my idol is Batman. |
Then we go publish it and 🤞 hope for the best.
Because we don't have high hope in prior (because expectation kills), we just release it sincerely to the Play Store. We hope we can get valuable feedback as a return. This is not our first built/developed app, but this our first app where we put a lot of effort into rich visualization + API integration! WTV. 🙄
It went well. 😲
 |
| Featured in the Top Chart; Trending. No.4! |
What made us proud
What Aan learned
What Alex learned
What improvement we will do next.
✅ 24-Hour Format
✅ Dark Mode everyone wants
✅ Amend the repetitive search result bugs
☑️ Widget! (Wait for it)
