We’ve heard from some users that the city-picker tray is missing most of the cities. Our developer believes this is an issue with the National Weather Service feed. This is what it looks like on the Mac version of the app.
We’re monitoring it but expect the issue to be resolved once the NWS restores the feed.
UPDATE: This is still happening, and we’ve heard from at least one other source that their use of NWS feeds have been affected. So we continue to believe this is an issue with the source, and not our app. We are still looking into it, and we appreciate your patience.
And, we are missing cities again this morning. Still appears to be an issue with the feed, here’s hoping the NWS gets this under control soon.
Another update:
It turns out that the NWS released a new version of its Application Programming Interface, or API, which is what developers use to receive and work with its data. That version apparently broke something in our app, according our developer Hussain Abbasi.
What’s weird: In the morning there are a few cities (sometimes just Houston, which is IAH) and their number increases during the day. Later we end up with the full roster of 12 cities.
Hussain is digging into this today, but it looks like we’ll have to do an app update.
I’ll have more once we have something definitive. Thanks for your patience!
We found the problem. And it’s our problem, not the NWS’ problem.
The vanishing cities issue is caused by a bug in the app that is triggered when the temperature values coming from NWS drop below a certain point – something we couldn’t easily test for when it was warm.
The app calculates Heat Index and Wind Chill differently (they show up in the same box in the conditions portion of the home screen). When it switches over from the former to the latter, it generates a value that the app doesn’t understand, and quits showing the cities where it’s cold.
But as the day warms up and the current temps rise to the Heat Index threshold, the correct values return and the cities show up. Which is why, during the day, we’d have more and more cities reappear in the picker.
Hussain is working on a fix and we’ll soon have a patched version of the app that works regardless of the chill in the air!
A new version of the app that fixes this weird bug is rolling out for both Android (it’s already in the Play Store) and Apple devices (awaiting approval). More details in this blog post.
