Category: Seasonality (Page 5 of 6)

Last week, Seasonality was reviewed over on Surf-Bits, and this week they posted The Mac ReviewCast #27. The Seasonality review starts at minute 19 of the podcast. Then keep listening for their review of Gus’ new app, FlyGesture, which he just released as 1.0 today. Congrats Gus!

The Unofficial Apple Weblog just posted a nice review of Seasonality as well. Thanks!

…I think Gaucho Software’s Seasonality is going to be a great addition to my stable of weather apps. The feature-set is rich, it looks slick and it has an intuitive and logical interface.

Surf-Bits posted an excellent review of Seasonality over on their site…

What I liked most about Seasonality was it’s ease of use and flexibility. It was extremely easy for me to setup multiple monitoring locations so I could at a glance see what the weather happened to be like in London while I was chatting on the phone with a client in England.

In case you haven’t heard, Hurricane Wilma is brewing out off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula right now. Wilma is the strongest hurricane ever measured in the Atlantic ocean, when a hurricane hunter aircraft measured a central air pressure of just 882mb a few days ago, 6 millibars lower than the previous record. The hurricane has “weakened” since then and has now settled down to a Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds, but that’s still pretty strong. It’s heading directly towards Cozumel and Cancun at the moment. I would hate to see that area destroyed…Katrina and I went on a cruise that stopped at Cozumel for our honeymoon. It was a great little town and we had a lot of fun both there and in Playa del Carmen.

Hurricane Wilma, October 20 6pm EDT

Meteorologists really aren’t sure where it’s gonna go from here, but it looks like it will sweep across Florida before heading North off the east coast…

So what’s next? Well, after getting to the letter W for yearly storm names, Greek letters are used. The next storm will be alpha, beta, etc… It’s rare to get this far in the alphabet, and there are still several weeks left of hurricane season. This year is definitely one for the record books.

One thing I never expected when starting work on Seasonality is the shear amount of weather data that is available on the web. Sometimes it’s hard to get a handle on all the information. I have a weather database served by PostgreSQL, and that’s starting to take several GB on my server. Well, last night I was browsing for a METAR station name listing (the station names I currently have are truncated to around 15 characters), and I came across an NOAA FTP server that allows users to download raw METAR observations for all the sites around the globe. This is the same data I use to draw the graph in Seasonality, so I had to check it out…

Sure enough, even though the file format is kind of messy, I was able to write a download/parsing script to access the data and insert it into my database. The dataset is just huge…after only 12 hours I’ve collected somewhere in the order of 100,000 records. It’s almost too much data for my lowly database server to handle, originally taking about 75% of the time to actually parse the data that was generated in a given time span. I eventually optimized it a bit, so it will fetch data every 2 hours and take maybe a half hour to do the parsing.

So what am I going to do with this data? Well, there’s a ton of possibilities, but the best one I can think of is to offer a method for new Seasonality users to “download the last month/3 months of graph data.” This way users won’t have to wait so long to get a good range of graph data. We’ll have to see how this goes though. Obviously there are bandwidth and storage issues involved, and I’m sure that once the database gets beyond a certain size, scalability will be an issue as well.

Another cool database I found about a month ago was the GEOnet Names Server (GNS). This is a database of around 5 million different cities and geographic features worldwide. I ended up importing this data into Postgres as well, though I had to transfer the database to my G5 to execute queries in any reasonable amount of time. After creating several indexes on the table and giving the database 1.5Gb of RAM (enough to store the full table in), I got a typical select down to around 10 seconds for a full table scan based on indexed columns. It’s actually faster locally then using their web server to do a query…then again I’m the only user hitting it over here. 🙂 This data source helped a lot when I was trying to find longitude/latitude pairs for the new global locations in the upcoming version.

In case you haven’t heard, hurricane Katrina will be hitting Florida during the next several hours. It’s pretty cool that they used Katrina’s name, since it’s not too common of a name to begin with. Anyway, thought I would take the opportunity to post another snapshot of Seasonality 1.1, this one is from Fort Lauderdale, FL:

Though completely new for this version, I’ve posted about the new satellite imagery a few times previously so I won’t talk about that here (that’s one heck of a storm though!). However, in this shot you can also see some new features in the graph views. For one, there are two new graph types, a Pressure Graph and Wind Direction Graph (I haven’t quite finished this one yet). Also, each graph now has a gear menu where you can choose which graph to display. Originally I thought I would just let people choose what the secondary graph would be, but in the end figured it wasn’t difficult to let people specify which dataset to display for both of them.

The list of new features for version 1.1 is pretty incredible. I’ve had more check-ins to the code repository than I can count, and as of right now I’ve added about 6000 lines of code since the last release (not including a lot of code refactoring). Furthermore, there are many areas where I was able to improve performance (sometimes 2 or 3x). It should be a pretty cool release, and hopefully sales will reflect that afterwards. 🙂

Seasonality 1.1 is coming along pretty well, and I thought I would take this opportunity to show everyone one of the biggest changes: the satellite/radar view. Seasonality 1.1 will allow users to browse the whole earth in the image view, not just a location’s surrounding area. This has been a lot of work, but I think the results are an order of magnitude nicer than the last implementation. Here are some sample screenshots. You can click on any of these to see the full sized image.

That’s right, you can zoom waaay out now to see the big picture. Satellite cloud overlays are available world-wide. In this picture of Arizona with the cloud mapping turned off you can see the much-improved terrain resolution. The new terrain has 4x the res of Seasonality 1.0’s terrain, and if you took a full res image of the earth you would have 21600 x 10800 pixels. Another shot, this time of the Caribbean to show the cloud resolution. It is much lower than the terrain resolution, but with bi-cubic scaling it isn’t as rough around the edges.

I would love to get this release out the door ASAP, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done for international location support. I finally found a source for global weather forecasts, so I’m pretty happy about that. At this point, I’m thinking it will be ready in September, but no guarantees. 🙂