WxFix™ Weather by Eelios

Our new WordPress site design is now posted, after less than a week of implementing a new design (WordPress calls it a “theme”). WP sure is slick that way, making new themes (or designs) easy as pie to implement. Anyway, we wanted a cleaner, simpler look, with nicer graphics and better navigation. We hope you like the new look.

We also wanted better customer support, and on that score we’ve implemented probably the biggest change over the old site. We’ve gone to an interactive online customer support model via the Get Satisfaction web service. This enables you to interact one on one more directly with us than before with your questions, comments, suggestions and feedback. We think (we hope!) this is a slick, customer friendly way to better connect with our customers and provide better service.

So, please let us know what you think. We’re thinking we’ll let this new site design ride for awhile, as we gauge its effectiveness, so don’t expect huge changes any time soon, other than maybe some new/refreshed content or graphics from time to time.

Thanks for checking us out, thanks for your support, and we hope your week is off to a great start! Ours is.

Many of us are taking a minute or two out of our busy lives today to remember the sacrifices our brave military men and women in harm’s way have made for us since our country’s founding. And continue to make today, in far away – and dangerous – corners of the world where a hot meal, let alone a hot shower, is a real luxury. Where each day means hoping you and your buddies just make it through today, and the next day… Whether through IEDs, suicide bombers, and ambushes. Or through boredom, uncertainty, and fear.

All the freedoms we enjoy today in this great country we owe to those who answered the call to serve when asked, or volunteered even before they were asked, and in doing so sacrificed many of their own freedoms. And far too often, gave the ultimate sacrifice.

To all veterans who have served and sacrificed to protect our liberties, and to all active duty, Reserve and Guard personnel who continue to sacrifice in harms way around the world today, THANK YOU, and God Bless you!

A new version of WxFix Standard and Lite should be on the App Store soon. It incorporates several changes and improvements to WxFix, several of them based on direct customer feedback. To those customers who’ve provided this feedback (you know who you are), THANK YOU!!!

So, what’s new? First, the biggest functional improvement is faster radar image download time. Instead of waiting for the whole radar loop to download, you’ll see the initial image of the loop almost right away while the remaining images download. Along with a few other minor tweaks to the radar display, these improvement are aimed at making your user experience better by getting the radar information to you quicker.

Another major functional improvement is mainly for iPod touch users (and for iPhone users who may have access to WiFi in the absence of a cellular signal) who are tied to WiFi in order to use WxFix. Sometimes a WiFi network or router won’t give your current location (actually, the router location), which basically means you can’t get a forecast for your current location, since the app has no location input. While we can’t do anything about a given WiFi router not providing a location, we can help you work around this by letting you manually enter your location – an address, zip code, lat / lon coordinates, or place name (e.g. Disney World). This will enable you to input your current location (precisely if you have lat/lon info) and thus get a forecast for that location. This should be especially helpful, say, if your home WiFi network fails to provide your location.

The other main improvements are for the WxFix Lite. We’ve upgraded the radar display to full animation as in the Standard version, and instead of limiting you to a max of two saved favorites, you’ll be able to save as many as you want. The main difference on this versus saving favorites in the Standard version, is that only on the Standard version can you drop pins on the map and save them as favorites, and only on Standard can you save locations from your contacts list.

There are few other performance improvements plus a few minor bug fixes. These are things you won’t necessarily see in the user interface, but they should enhance the overall performance of WxFix and make for a better user experience.

We continue to solicit your direct input on WxFix and your suggestions for improvements and changes you’d like to see. While we may not be able to incorporate every idea, we will listen and keep in mind any good suggestion or idea.

And, of course, we want to know about any problems you might run into using the app. It will help a lot if you tell us what device you’re using (i.e., iPhone 3G, 3Gs, iPod touch), what type of network you’re using (cellular – 2G/Edge, 3G, or WiFi), and what OS version you have installed in your device (on your iPhone or iPod touch you’ll find this in Settings-About-Version).

Thanks so much for your input and support. Look for the new version soon on the app store. If you’ve already downloaded either WxFix Standard or Lite, or do so between now and when the new version turns up on the App Store, you’ll be able to upgrade for free to the new version.

Probably more than once there’ve been times when you’ve thought you knew what was going to happen. You were absolutely, positively, take-it-to-the-bank sure of it. Only to find out later your assumption wasn’t so accurate. Maybe not even in the same hemisphere.

That’s what happens a lot with weather forecasts, as it relates to affecting every day life. You see the weather forecast in TV in the AM as you’re rushing to get the kids ready for school and yourself out the door for work. You focus on the “big picture” for the day – is it gonna be sunny or cloudy? Is it gonna rain? Snow? How windy? How hot/cold? Then you take the generalized forecast and off you go.

Then you get to your kid’s soccer game after work, or meet up with a colleague for a quick 9 holes of golf. Or get in your car to drive to that fund raiser across town, or another town an hour away. And the weather ain’t anything like what the TV weather person said it was gonna be 8 hours earlier.

This happens to us all the time, because the TV weather person or gal, earnest and good as she or he is, can’t tell you what the weather is likely gonna do at the EXACT locations where you will be, in the time frames you will be there. That’s because they don’t have the geo-spatially accurate forecast tools that gives them the locational accuracy you need. Furthermore, the weather they’re regurgitating is for fixed weather reporting sites that may be miles from where you are or plan to be.

We’re different. We have the geo-spatial tools to give you the forecast for the places you actually want to know about, and we’re not bound by fixed-site forecasts either. And all this is inside WxFix, which you can use throughout you day, every day, to know the forecasts for the places YOU and your family are going be. Only you know what you’ll be doing, where and when. With WxFix, you have an app at your beck and call that syncs the weather with your day, you week, your life.

So, listen to the weather person as you drink your morning coffee. Then have WxFix give you the real scoop on the weather the rest of the day, for wherever you are or plan to be going.

…for whatever you want to do. Pick your poison or your pleasure, and a 70 deg F, low humidity late October day – especially on a weekend – is to be savored. Raking leaves (like yours truly did all Sunday), golfing, taking a long walk or a jog, visiting family or friends, or just reading a good book. It’s all good stuff on a day like this. Because there just aren’t many of ‘em left.

I’m guessing not everybody across our great land had the same spectacular day we had here today in the mid west. If not, may the good fall weather gods look upon you favorably and give you a few “Indian summer” days to savor all yourself, while there’s still time, before the shorter days and sagging jet stream bring cold arctic air masses down to your neighborhood.

If you’re in SoCal, well, consider yourself lucky you don’t even have to think about winter’s icy grip being right around the corner. On the other hand, consider yourself unlucky that you don’t get to experience a real, long, dark, cold winter. Because living through one of these makes you appreciate all the more fall’s dying, residual warmth, knowing what’s to come.

It’s that time of year, when the smell of BBQ and spilled beer wafts through the asphalt lots of stadiums around the country. Tailgating, if you listened to Frank Deford on NPR this AM, is America’s new form of picnicing. Instead of spreading a checkered blanket on a grassy meadow and serving sandwiches and potato salad out of a wicker basket, we spread our folding canopies, tables, and camp chairs out across cold asphalt, in the very time of year when most of us wouldn’t think of going picnicing in the traditional sense. But there we are, braving fall’s biting winds and worrying about the threat of rain, or later in the fall, some form of freezing precip, warmed only by the next guy’s trailered grill, or our little hibachi. And maybe by the thought of a victory by the home team.

So, why waste these precious moments of togetherness in a parking lot to unexpected weather, when you can drop a pin on the parking lot of your stadium (and/or on the field, too) and know in advance of and during your tailgate what weather mother nature intends to spring (fall?) on you right at the exact spot where you’re tailgating or enjoying the game. We all know football weather can be dicey and unpredictable. With WxFix you can all but eliminate the element of surprise and make football weather one less thing you have to worry about.

As for your favorite team and predicting what’ll happen in the game, sorry, we’ll have to work on that one.

Service (and server) back on line. Radar data, depending on location, may take up to 1/2 hour to come back fully. We’ve done a DNS re-config and are looking at the server failover plan (we do have backups) closely to see what needs to be done to prevent another disruption.

Again, we apologize for any break in service you may have briefly experienced this AM. Any other issues you’re seeing or having please let us know via support@eelioscorp.com. We do want to hear from you, whether you’re a WxFix customer or thinking of becoming one.

We’ve had a lot of interest in WxFix, and have started receiving questions about how it’s really different from the other weather apps on the App Store (or elsewhere for that matter). Here’s one we got just today: “Interested in buying your app, but don’t understand how your source weather data is any different than, say, the (”Brand X”) app. Don’t you all use the same National Weather Service Data? And the same (weather) reporting stations?”

Great question. Thanks for asking! This questioner is essentially right, and clearly understands what’s behind most weather forecasts!

All other weather apps basically just report the weather and rebroadcast the NWS forecast for the 1,400 or so weather stations located throughout the US. This results in a fairly inaccurate forecast – or no forecast – when the mobile user is not in close proximity to a particular weather reporting station.  When designing WxFix we clearly saw this as a problem, because mobile users needed a forecast that met the requirements of being mobile and needed a precise forecast based on their location, and not the location of a far-away weather station.

Our solution was to use an ensemble of various public and private weather sources that results in a precise forecast for all of the US, including remote mountain and rural areas. This method is unique in weather apps, but of course it’s a forecast and not perfect. And on that score, we’re working on some new “stuff” to improve forecast accuracy on several levels. So, please stay tuned.

Again, thanks for asking, and please keep those questions coming!

An updated version of WxFix Lifestyle Weather app, version 1.4 in both Standard and Lite, is now available on the iTunes App Store. This version fixes several crash-causing bugs identified in the initial version 1.2, and improves some internal threading for faster response to user queries. If you already own WxFix version 1.2 you may download the new version 1.4 as a free update to your existing copy of the app. If you haven’t yet downloaded WxFix from the App Store but plan to, you’ll be the lucky beneficiary of the improvements made in version 1.4.

And please, contact us with your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, and / or feedback…(breathe)…about WxFix. We really do really want to know what you really think. Really!

Well, we finally got our new WxFix “Lifestyle Weather” app up on the iTunes App Store. Congrats to the Team – Jim, Hasani, Kyle, Ted, Plamen, Kimo, Brian and all the others for their contributions and continued support. We could not have gotten here without y’alls help and faith in this project.

Also, huge thanks to 21CSI (21st Century Systems, Inc.), our parent company, for its continued support and patience.

So now the fun starts and we get to see how well we can satisfy our customers – the iPhone users who are magnanimous enough to open their wallets a little and pony up a few bucks for WxFix Standard. And those who try out WxFix Lite (free) and then figure out that they REALLY NEED WxFix Standard.

Anyway, we appreciate if you’ve already seen fit to download WxFix, whether Standard or Lite, and we want to hear from you – how and where you use WxFix, what you do with it, what you like and don’t like. Future versions and improvements / enhancements will depend on your direct feedback.

Pursuant to feedback… the comments section for this blog page is currently broken. Aargh! Anyway, we should have it sorted out shortly and thus be able provide an open forum for your comments. In the meantime (or anytime), please forward any of your comments and feedback to support@eelioscorp.com. We do look forward to hearing from you!

Oh, also, please check out the WxFix Weather Network, a social network site built around WxFix and the weather “community”. Please join, start your own group or forum topi. post a blog, post weather-related photos. We’d love to see this develop into one of the web’s most interesting and fun social networks for people who want to, well, talk about the weather in whatever context in meaningful for them. Tastefully, of course. WxFix Weather Network….please check it out!

Well, looks like a good weekend of early Fall weather ahead here in the Great Plains. How’s it looking where you are, or where you plan to be this weekend? We invite you to download WxFix on the App Store and explore what Lifestyle Weather means to you!