68 posts Posts by hugo

Rainy Days 2.1

by on June 30, 2011,

Here it is, a new update to Rainy Days, still going strong :) In 2.1 I’ve added a couple of features:

  • On screen legenda, ranging from light to heavy precipitation (yes, finally!)
  • You can now search for a location, using the search key or the search option from the menu. This also allows for a lightweight form of bookmarking places, as your searches are remembered.
  • As for coverage, Guam was added.
  • For developers, you can now start Rainy Days with a desired location using an intent. Contact me for details if you want ’em.

Under the hood lots has been changed again to improve stability and make it possible to add new cool features which I’m working on.

Another change that I’m making is that Rainy Days will be ad supported as of today. The main reason for is simple: Rainy Days is costing me money. How much depends on the actual use of Rainy Days, but since the app gets more and more popular, the costs will rise and I need a way to at least partially cover those costs. In the past I’ve received some donations through paypal and the donation app, but while they are very much appreciated, the current rate of donations isn’t enough to be sort of sustainable. Thanks again to all of you who have donated!

For those of you who don’t want to see ads, there’s the option to upgrade from within the app for a small fee, which will disable the ads on all your devices forever. The next two weeks I’ll price the upgrade at only $0.99 cents. Sorry, I can not auto-upgrade those who have previously donated due to technical reasons, I hope you understand. Feel free to contact me for further details.

I hope you’ll like the new features! You can get the updated Rainy Days app from the Android market.

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New app released: Budget Coach

by on May 11, 2011,

At Qbus we build great web applications and mobile apps. Just now we have released a new app: Budget Coach. Budget Coach is an app that helps you tracking your budget in a easy and simple way.

For this app we worked together with Nong Sudson at http://www.plasmastudio.nl/, who developed the concept and the design of the app. Check out some of screenshots and download it from the Android market today for free!

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Unquoted paths with Nginx and Trac

by on March 18, 2011,

This took me ages to find so I’d better document it here. When switching to nginx from lighttpd I ran into some problems with the trac instance that was running through fcgi. After following most of the tutorials around to set it up, all looked fine. Then I ran into issue 9755.

To solve it I first tried to go the proxy-standalone-trac route, which has an unquote option to cope with this issue. But in that case my authentication through nginx would never work. In the end I went digging in the trac source code and found the FlupMiddleware class that is used when running in “unquote” mode for tracd. After some more digging I found that in Trac 0.12.2 this is integrated in the fcgi_frontend.py script that is distributed with Trac. 

So here it comes…To activate the unquoting just set the environment variable TRAC_USE_FLUP to true (actually anything but 0, no or false will do) and we’re golden.

Hope that ‘ll save you some hours, like I wasted mine :)

Small Rainy Days update: 2.0.1

by on January 31, 2011,

After my previous post I did some bug hunting, and I got a response from a few users. With this info I have implemented (what I hope) a workaround for the slowness on Droid Eris.

I also fixed the few bugs that where reported through the automated Android error reporting so Rainy Days should be a little bit more stable now.

One thing that I can’t stress enough is this: if you experience issues with the app, and you want those issues to be fixed, please, pretty please (sugar on top) contact me! Without any details I’m pretty much blind, which is frustrating to say the least :)

I hope you all enjoy the update! 

What’s wrong with Eris?

by on January 19, 2011,

After releasing Rainy Days 2.0, I see some comments in the Android Market that suggest that Rainy Days is not working/slow/something else on Droid Eris. Unfortunately most of those people do not contact me, so I have no clue what’s going on. I don’t own a Droid Eris. I do own a HTC Hero however, which is about the same device. On that device Rainy Days works OK, maybe a little bit slower than before, but it works fine otherwise. I might be able to speed things a bit more for these, let’s face it, somewhat older devices.

So Eris users, please contact me and explain the issue. Please also mention your connection speed e.g. what’s displayed in the notification bar of your device (G, EDGE, 3G, etc). Also mention if you are using a custom rom or not.

Rainy Days 2.0

by on January 12, 2011,

Yay! For various reasons it has taken me a while to update Rainy Days, but now I’m pleased to let you know that I’ve just released version 2.0!

One of the top requests and bug report was that for the US the radar images sometimes where “cut off”, for example on large screen phones such as the EVO and tablets. I’ve now fixed this technical limitation and in fact changed a lot on how Rainy Days loads the images. A direct result of this is that the “loading” screen is gone forever, just like the “refresh” button. Rainy Days will now automatically refresh the images, to save you the hassle.

Radar images are now also more up to date and, depending on the zoom levels, load faster. There is no more distinction between high dpi devices and low dpi devices.

Another issue some of you run into is the location that is reported. Sometimes network location just isn’t accurate enough so I’ve added an option to also use GPS. You can find this option in the settings.

As for coverage: Puerto Rico was added and a big overlay from Eumetsat, covering places in Europe and Africa, really cool!

I hope you like the update, as always, feedback is very much appreciated.

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Rainy Days testers wanted

by on September 25, 2010,

I’m looking for testers for the upcoming 2.0 version of Rainy Days. If you like to help me test it, please drop me an email! You can find the address in the Android market. (Yes, consider that a test :))

Update: Thanks to everybody who has helped me test 2.0! I’ve just released the new version.

Engine Watch 1.4 released!

by on September 12, 2010,

It’s been a while, but I’ve updated Engine Watch today to version 1.4. Engine Watch 1.4 is almost a complete rewrite to add an important feature: notifications.

It is now possible to get a notification when a particular app is over its quota, and you can disable or adjust the notification per quota item that you’d like to monitor.

Another change is that Engine Watch 1.3 was “account centric” while 1.4 is “application centric”. When you start Engine Watch you now select the application you’d like to monitor, removing the need to select an account first. I think this makes a bit more sense and easier to use :)

Check out the screenshots below and download Engine Watch from the Market by scanning the barcode

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I’ve created a dedicated page for Engine Watch here with some more info and screenshots. Enjoy!

Rainy Days radar clutter

by on September 5, 2010,

Currently US radar coverage is filtered a bit more in an attempt to reduce radar clutter. Please let me know if you think this is an improvement or not. Obviously I can’t go over there and check for myself :)

Rainy Days update

by on August 28, 2010,

While I’m still working on the next version of Rainy Days, I just pushed out an update for Rainy Days 1.9.
On some devices the settings screen could not be accessed and I’ve fixed this in 1.9.1, with the help of Karl Pearson, who was so kind to report the bug and test the fix.

For several reasons work on Rainy Days 2.0 has been a bit delayed, but I’m making progress, more on that in the couple of weeks!

Update: I noticed some crash reports in the Market console which I have fixed in 1.9.2…and that broke other stuff, so now 1.9.3 is out :)