WeatherFixâ„¢ by Eelios

New WxFix version 1.5 has been approved by Apple and is ready for sale! It should be up on the App Store shortly in both Standard ($3.99) and Lite (free) versions.

From all of us at Eelios, we wish you a safe, mild & dry Thanksgiving weekend. Happy Thanksgiving!

One of the main functional attributes of WxFix Standard version is the ability to drop a pin on the map anywhere you want, save it as a favorite, and get the weather forecast to that exact location whenever you want. This is a pretty long and detailed explanation, but if you’re more of a visual person, check out any of the YouTube videos on this site becuase they all show graphically how to drop a pin and save it as a favorite. Otherwise, if you want to take a few minutes and read about how to do it, well, read on…

So, just how do you do this pin thing? First off, dropping a pin is done from the “Map” screen. There is a lot going on with this screen, so please stay with us here…. While there are a few steps to go through, it’s really not complicated once you’ve tried it out once or twice.

Note: When the map screen first opens up it is defaulted to your current location. You’ll see a blue dot with a pulsing ring around it indicating your current location. It may or may not be on your exact spot, depending on your cell signal and how accurate of a GPS coordinate the cell network is giving you. If you’re outside you’ll generally get better locational accuracy than if you’re inside. For iPod touch users, locational accuracy (or getting your location at all) is entirely a function of you wifi network.

When you go to the map screen you have to option of searching for a location, either by place name, address, or lat/lon (if you have the coordinates). To do this, touch the search bar at the top of the screen, and the keyboard will pop up from the bottom. Type in a street address, place name or lat/lon of the location you want to search for in the search bar, and hit “Send”. The map should “fly” over to the location of the address or place you typed. (If nothing happens or the search comes up blank, try typing more info, like adding a zip code, or a more detailed place name.)

Once the map has flown over to the general area of your selected location either double tap or expand the screen with you thumb/forefinger to zoom in closer on the map until you get the level of detail you want. (It may take a few seconds between each double tap or finger expansion for new map tiles to load). Now, touch the “action key” at the top right corner of the screen (this looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it). You will see a menu pop up from the bottom. From this menu you can select “Drop Pin” and/or change the map display from the street map default setting to “Satellite” or “Hybrid.” Hybrid provides the most map detail – a satellite view with a street map overlay. Select whatever view you prefer, wait a few second for the map tiles to show up, then select “Drop Pin”.

When you touch “Drop Pin” a pin will drop onto the center of the map display. To move the pin exactly to where you want it, touch the pin for about 1 second (you’ll see it jump slightly), then with your finger drag it over to the exact spot you want to drop it, and release your finger. To replace the pin, touch “Replace Pin”.

Once the pin is right where you want it, you can save it as a favorite. But first, you may want to take a screen capture of the map with your pin on the location you’re about to save. To do this, press the iPhone sleep button (on top of the device) and Home button (round button of the screen face at the bottom) simultaneously… voila, a beautiful screen capture of your pin location will be saved in the photo library.

Now, touch the arrow on the right side of the pin location weather summary bar… this is the bar situated right above the pin you just dropped that shows the location address and a current weather icon… the white inside a blue circle arrow is on the right side of the bar. Touch this and you will go the “Now” screen showing you the current weather for that location.

Now touch the Action Key on the top right of the screen, and a menu pops up from the bottom with several choices: Add to Favorites, Share via Email, and Refresh.

Select “Add to Favorites”. This will take you to the favorites customization screen. First, touch the square in the upper left corner of the screen (the one showing the WxFix icon). A menu pops up from the button, in which you can select “Take Photo” or “Choose Existing Photo.” Remember that screen shot you just took? Select “Choose Existing Photo”, and this takes you to your photo library. Find the screen shot you just took – it will probably be at the very bottom of your photo library – and either select that, or some other photo you want to associate with the location you are about to save. Select “Choose”, and the photo (or screen shot) will be saved into that square tile.

Next, touch the dialogue box and type in what you want to call your new favorite location… “Home”, “Work”, “Golf”, “Aunt Edna”… whatever… then select “Add”.

Congratulations! You’ve dropped a pin on the exact location you wanted and saved it as a favorite. You can now access this favorite via the Favorites screen, by touching the “Favorites” tile on the bottom of the WxFix display.

Okay, so this is a very detailed explanation on how to perform this function and it sounds complicated. But once you’ve done it a time or two, it’ll be second nature and much quicker than you might think. Hope this tip helps… Happy Pin Dropping!

With WxFix on the App Store and on users’ iPhones and iPod touches now for nearly two months, it’s time to provide some tips & tricks to help you use the app to its fullest capability. There’s a lot to this app, and if we can help you discover and make us of its many features, we’ll all benefit.

First up, how do you get a 6 day forecast by day instead of by hour? We’ve heard from several users who either didn’t know this feature existed, or did but didn’t know how to access it, and were tired of swiping through the hourly forecast screen to see the forecast 6 days out.

So, how do you do this? First, make sure you’re in the “Now” screen (touch the “Now” button on the lower left tile on your screen display), select “Current” (if it’s not on the “Current” screen already), tap once anywhere on the Now/Current screen…. voila, you’ll see the six day forecast pop up from the bottom, with the current and next two days showing at the bottom of the screen. Swipe the day forecast tiles to the left to see the next three days after that, swipe back to the right to go back to current and next two days. You can touch each day tile to see the forecast summary for that day. You can do this for any of your favorite locations you’ve saved, as well as for your current location. Tap the “Now/Current” screen again and and the 6 day tiles will pop back down.

So there you go… now you know how to see the 6 day forecast. Next up, for WxFix Standard users, how to drop a pin and save it as a favorite.

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.