ajetty/weather-buddy

Weather app with virtual pet

Weather Buddy Android App

A weather app with virtual pet to keep you company! This app shows current temperature, weather condition and a virtual pet that change color according to the temperature, humidity, and weather status.

What we used for our app:

• Weather API
• Linear Constraints
• Image View with vectors to display our character

Contributors

• Ponaroth Eab
• Ashley Jetty
• Brian Hernadez
• Magarita Nuridjanian

Ponaroth

Tasks:

• Find free weather API
• Implement API in our Android app
• Load data from API and put them onto display

Brian

Tasks:

• Design app character (Buddy)
• Create app design (Main Fragment)
• Find wallpapers to use with app for different times of the day
• Find icons to use for app conditions

The Character Design:

I created this with objects using Adobe Illustrator
Goal with virtual character:

• We wanted to make our app different from the other weather apps
• Character should move around (When it rains, takes out umbrella)
• Character should give you information about the day

I did not have time to animate the character

App Design:

Information displayed from API:

• Current weather (Degrees in fahrenheit)
• Min/max weather in the day
• Current weather conditions (Sunny, rainy, windy)

It has a textClock to display the clock in real time.

The Wallpapers for Day-Times:

These 8 images change depending on the time of the day.

Icons:

The weather icons should change depending on the weather condition returned by the API.

Ashley

Tasks:

• Vectorize the character to display on app
• Have the character adapt to the weather (Changes color and state)
• Have the wallpaper adapt to the time of day
• Have the icons adapt to weather conditions

Custom ImageView:

A drawable layer containing the vector xml files of Buddy's images that make up the whole was created in custom ImageView and the widget itself was given this drawable layer as it's foreground drawable source.

Because custom ImageView is extended from ImageView, it can be used in a layout file. It is a widget.

Custom ImageView also has an instance of an array map and methods to call on this array map when an observed variable from ViewModel is changed.

• Buddy's head color represents temperature.
• His body color represents a weather condition.
• His arm's body color represents the humidity.

Array Map:

An instance of an array map is in the custom ImageView that stores weather conditions, temperature, and humidity values that are given by the OpenWeather API. Each of these key conditions are associated with a color value. An array map was the chosen structure because of its design to be more memory efficent than hashmap for small sizes of data. Even with its slower search speed. We only modify/create the map once so memory allocation is not in consideration.

ViewModel:

ViewModel has mutable live data that stores the changing weather condition, temperature, and humidity values that are supplied and updated by the weather API. ViewModel observes these values and when any of them change value tells the custom ImageView to update the drawable layer 'Buddy' with the sent value of the changed variable from ViewModel using the array map.

Margarita

Tasks:

• Create settings fragment to update/change the city
• Have the user input update the location for the API
• Have API update the weather conditions

The settings can be accessed by clicking on the top settings icon located at the top left hand side of the screen.

The settings page is responisble for changing the location used in the app.

If a location is valid it will change the location on the homepage.
If the location is not valid, or blank the location will remain the same as the previous location, and error message will also display on the settings screen telling you if the location is invalid and asking you to refer to all the valid locations located at the openweather api website.

Getting Started

clone the project:

git clone 

Prerequisites

Download Android Studio 

https://developer.android.com/

Download Java Development Kit

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

Installing

Install Android studio
Install JDK

Running the tests

Run it on any Android device or emulator that has Android 7.0 or above.

Built With

• Kotlin - Kotlin Programming Language
• OpenWeatherMap.org - Free Weather API
• Android Studio - Android IDE