Are you thinking of what the weather is like in some city? Well wonder no more, this app can tell you how the weather is over there.
It's as simple as typing the name of a place, pushing a button, searching the place with that name associated with it, tapping it, and getting information about that place such as the time, and temperature.
For starters, what you need to do is type on the search bar the actual name of the place you want to get information about its weather and time, then press the button to proceed with the next
Since a lot of places might use a name that's also used by another city; state, region, country, or area to refer to it, the app will give you a list of ten places that have a similar name yet are located in two separate countries, states, regions, etc.
To aid you in your search, you can see the name of the country as well as the name of the region to easily identify the place you meant by the name you searched.
Once you have found it, it's just a matter of tapping it and waiting for the weather data to arrive to your phone in seconds.
After you choose the city of preference, you will see weather data appearing on your screen. It might take a few seconds to load all the data and prepare the right visuals for the weather information received.
This screen will present data including time of place, current temperature, list of temperatures by hour, visual icons to express the state of weather, and other useful stats.
You can check the weather in another city if you want by going back to the previous search menu. However, your current search results will disappear once you return to the search menu screen.
At the time of development, I used XML to design the App's UI. I didn't add new features until now I decided to work from where I left off. This project now implements Jetpack Compose for all UI components in the App. Due to that, I had to migrate to new current version catalog system to add dependencies using Gradle. I had a difficult time trying to get Dagger-Hilt to work as soon as I updated Android Studio since there would be an error caused by Kapt, but I found this useful post on Stack Overflow which could help anyone who comes across this issue.
This version had the following features:
- Search up to 10 cities
- Discover the time and temperature of the city at the time of the search
- Display an icon according to the time whether it's night or day
This version has the following features:
- Two screens: A search-city screen and weather-info screen.
- Discover weather information such as:
- Weather name
- weather icon
- Current temperature
- Current time
- Min and max temperatures
- Rain probability
- Humidity
- Wind speed.
- A list of today's temperature for every hour with a weather icon.
The app sends three API requests to two websites: Open-Meteo and Time Api
First, the app displays sends an API request to return all the possible matches of city names from your search.
Geocoding API This website returns all possible matches of city names along their geolocation information like longitude and latitude.
Then, the app proceeds to make another API request to determine the time of the place based on coordinates provided from the previous API results.
Timezone API This website returns the local time of the city based on its coordinates provided by the previous API request.
Finally, the app makes a last API request to obtain the weather of the city using again its coordinates
Forecast API This website provides weather data provided a location. This API call includes a variety of parameters to ensure weather information is completely shown on the app.
Each website contains examples of how each API call should be made and you could always choose the amount of parameters in your search to your like.
I'll improve the following things in the near future:
- Add an UI component to show the weather name, max and min temperature, and day of the week at the end of the screen.
- Use StateFlow to retrieve weather and timezone data in one use case from the two API services.
- Handle navigation between screens using a middle layer controller class or passing a singleton navigation controller to view models (Still deciding)
- I am planning to add a Settings screen to allow users select app language, temperature and wind speed units.
- Regarding weather icons, I might use a different method to display them since I don't think it's a good idea to store all icons in the drawable folder.
- Regarding code optimizations, I might use a different approach to MVVM architectures since all view models are injected in my views for previewing and UI tests.
This list is not sorted by improvement of most importance, I'm simply pointing out what improvements could be made to the app.
So far, I have managed to implement these things on the app:
- Create packages for specific app features and divide each package into three layers: presentation, domain, and data.
- Make Search screen more intuitive by adding a checkbox at the end of a city so users know from what city they're getting weather data.
- Search screen uses UIStates and UIEvents which are handled by the viewmodel. This means the screen can be previewed or tested.