Tuesday, February 9, 2016

WOIED Me

It seems that the Yahoo query table that I've been using to convert latitude and longitude into this thing called a Where On Earth ID (WOIED) which is used to look up the weather was shut down January 22, 2016.  This has lead to a number of emails saying the weather has stopped working. Fortunately there is a work around... If you go into the weather settings then choose "static location".  You'll be prompted for a location and you'll get a list of choices if there's more than one.  After the location is set use the next option down "use static location". This will give you a choice of three options, choose "always". The weather should load upon returning to the main screen.

There's a couple problems with making a fix for the issue.  Yahoo doesn't seem to provide a different way to convert latitude and longitude in to this WOEID. The next biggest problem is that I've had a serious lack of free time since finding out about the issue so I really haven't researched it yet.  The next big problem is that I currently don't have a development environment set up any more.  As I've always said, I'm a lunch time android developer and I started a new job about 6 months ago.  I've been working on other side projects and haven't installed anything to do Android development.  Which leads to the next problem... I didn't keep up with Android Studio (the "new" Google built IDE) and never converted the old eclipse project, so there's a bit of work to be done before I can fix the problem.

I do have two possible solutions once the development environment is setup.  
  1. Another free API (or APIs) to find the WOIED.  This is the simplest solution.  I've thought about finding a way to convert Latitude and Longitude into an address and then feeding that through the same process as the static location.  This way I can re-use the weather code. 
  2. Another free weather source.  openweathermap.org has been in a updates file as a possible replacement for the yahoo weather source, but this means a completely new API and completely re-writing the weather code (plus issues with images, etc).  This might be the best solution, but I don't know if I'll have the time to do it.
The bottom line is that I know there's an issue.  I know exactly where the problem is, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done before I can publish a new APK.  Please be patient, I'll get a fix out eventually.