FIOWrapper

A simple interface for accessing ForecastIO weather data.

Forecast.io is an awesome weather web-app brought to you by the same people that made Dark Sky. They provide an API for developers that is free for up to 1000 calls per day. After which the price skyrockets to $1 per 10,000. Dark Sky is my go to app for deciding exactly how far I'm willing to walk for lunch on ☔ days.

I was building my own little for-fun weather app using this API and decided to bundle up the models and request interface I was using into a little framework and open-source it. It's notification based because that's how I roll. If you're looking for a delegate based solution of perhaps something with more helper functions here are some other options:

Forecastr | libFIOApi

If you happen to use any of this code to make a million dollars on some phenomenal app, I'd appreciate a high-five the next time you see me. 🍺 Which will probably be never.

More seriously, send me a message on here so I can go grab your app!

Using/Enhancing this thing:

For starters, if you want to run/add to the unit tests, you're going to need to install the Cedar unit testing framework from the cool folks over at Pivotal Labs. It's a BDD-style framework for iOS that hooks relatively nicely into Xcode and I've been using it for a while now. This will probably be replaced by the enhanced unit testing in Xcode 5, but for now, here it is.

Installation:

I've created a podspec for easy integration via Cocoapods, which if you're not using... you're missing out. Read up a bit on CocoaPods, get it installed, then create a podfile with the following line:

pod 'ForecastIOWrapper', :git => 'https://github.com/kevinj04/ForecastIOWrapper.git'

Then run pod install.

Integrating into your App:

Importing these files is a bit ugly, I need to create a more useful generic header file. For now, you must:

#import <ForecastIOWrapper/FIOFileName.h>

This is currently a work in progress as I am just using this tool myself as I write this. For now, in order to get weather data into your app you need to do the following:

Set up the wrapper to use your forecast IO key.

[FIOAPI setForecastIOKey:@"your_forecast_io_developer_key"];

Register something in your app to listen for the weather update event.

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:someListenerObject selector:@selector(weatherUpdated:) name:FIOWeatherUpdateSuccess object:nil];

Add a method to your listener object to handle the notification.

- (void)weatherUpdated:(NSNotification *)notification {
  FIOWeather *weatherData = [notification userInfo][FIOAPIWeatherKey];
}

There are a number of other notifications that fire during the course of updating the weather. I'll cover them another day.

To actually get your weather update:

[FIOAPI requestWeatherForLocation:location];

Location is a CGPoint with (lat,long).