Tidely is a weather app for beach users which does far more than just provide you with the raw information. While other weather services simply list the conditions and put the onus on you to decide when and where they are suitable, Tidely simplifies this process by cutting away the effort and telling you directly when and where the weather conditions will be suitable for you.
This is achieved by having the user set a list of the activities they are interested in and what weather conditions they require for each activity when they register. From this point on every time that the user opens Tidely they will be greeted with a display showing all the times and locations in the following week at which these weather conditions are met.
Peter Goedeke - primary back-end developer.
Nicholas Bates - primary front-end developer.
Tidely is currently in development as a minimum viable product (MVP). The app breakdown is further down on this page and gives specification for Tidely as a full product. The differences are that the MVP will not contain filters, categories for beaches, overrides for activity settings based on beaches, weather for nearby locations (as opposed to user inputted locations), presets for activities, dashboard card ordering, and advanced weather options.
Weather information is provided by the World Weather Online marine API.
Geocoding is provided by the MapQuest Geocoding API
- The dashboard is the main screen of the application; a returning user is brought here upon login.
- The dashboard contains a list of all of the times and places at which the user may engage in the activities which they have indicated that they are interested in.
- Associated with a user account will be a list of the activities that a user is interested in and the weather conditions which they desire for these activities.
- The user may define exceptions to these preferences for specific beaches.
- Also associated with a user account will be a list of the beaches / locations at which the user desires to engage in their activities of interest list.
- This list of beaches / locations may be edited in its own page.
- Beaches may be added to categories. Exceptions to activity weather conditions may be applied to categories of beaches, rather than to specific beaches.
- The default mode of the application is to use the fixed list of beaches for activity recommendations. The user may change the mode of the application to 'nearby', which will make recommendations at nearby beaches. For how this interacts with filtering, see filtering.
- The last used mode of the application is remembered by the application on subsequent logins.
- The radius used to find nearby beaches may be specified by the user.
- The user may add and remove which activities they are interested in on the activities screen. They may also change the weather conditions they desire for each activity at this screen.
- This screen is the screen to which the user is brought upon registration so that they may initialise their account.
- The application contains a warning to the user to use it at their own discretion, as it is not possible for information surrounding which beaches have no access points or are private to be incorporated into the application's recommendations.
- The dashboard is mostly an information screen which does not allow for much user interaction in the way of changing data.
- If the user wishes to change their various preferences / account settings, they must do this by accessing one of the other pages from the dashboard page.
- The dashboard contains cards, with each card representing one of the activities that the user is interested in.
- Each card has a title representing the activity and a horizontally scrolling list of elements which each represent one time at which the weather conditions at a location meet the requirements specified by the user for the respective activity.
- Each element will display the timespan at which the weather requirements are met (e.g. 8.00-10.00am) and the location at which these requirements are met.
- For further information (i.e. the exact weather information over this timespan) the element may be clicked and a drawer will appear from the right hand side of the screen containing the information.
- Cards may be dragged and dropped by the user to reorder them.
- There are filtering buttons at the top of the dashboard which allow the user to filter certain elements out of the card displays.
- Additionally, there are filtering buttons at the top right of every card. By default the global filter is applied, but if a card specific filter is applied then it will be combined with the global filter in the way described under filtering.
- The filtering buttons at the top allow the user to filter elements out based on location; e.g. so that only certain beaches are shown in the results.
- Additionally, the filtering buttons allow filtering by time; e.g. so that night-time results are not shown.
- The card-specific filters will be appended to the global filter if they are compatible (e.g. if the global filter is for the time and the card-specific one is for the location, they must be compatible) to create more specific filters.
- If the filters are not compatible, then the card-specific one will be applied rather than the global one.
- Filters are defined either as "belonging to this group" or "not belonging to this group."
- Filtering rules are unique between default mode and nearby mode; i.e. the filtering rules applied in one mode do not apply to the other mode and are saved when swapping to the other mode.
- An activity consists of a name property and a set of weather preferences which the user wishes to perform the activity under.
- Activities may have weather preference overrides which apply only to specific beaches and override the user's general preferences for that activity (e.g. the user may indicate that although they usually enjoy walking at low-tide, on a specific beach they would prefer high tide)
- These exceptions may be applied to categories of beaches, rather than to specific beaches.
- Exceptions are not required to be defined as a completely different list of preferences; only the weather preferences which are different must be specified. In short, the beach specific settings are appended to the default settings with conflicts resulting in the beach specific settings overriding the default ones.
- Activities may also have an associated list of beaches which the user is not interested in performing the activity at (i.e. a blacklist of beaches for that activity).
- This blacklist may include categories of beaches to blacklist all beaches within the category.
- When deciding which timespans the user may want to perform an activity, the application will look at the weather preferences and find timespans which simultaneously meet all of the weather criteria.
- The basic criteria include wind speed, tide level, "feels like" temperature, cloud cover, sun position (e.g. a possible configuration could be 'after sunrise and before sunset'), and rainfall level.
- More advanced options such as humidity, moon phase, wind direction, swell direction, swell height, and swell period are also available.
- The user is not required to set a preference for every weather option; those which the user has no preference towards will not be factored into filtering out results which don't match the user's desires.
- The activities screen allows for the user to add and remove activities which they are interested in from the application.
- Activities should be selected from a presets list, which will have a list of common activities and the weather conditions which the user is most likely to desire for the specified activity.
- If the user has slightly different weather requirements for the activity as compared to the preset, the user may edit these before using it.
- Presets have their weather requirements described in a human readable format (e.g. cold weather excluded). Once the user has selected a preset, the fields are shown with their actual, numerical values. The user may alter these if they desire.
- Alternatively, users may create an activity with its weather requirements from scratch.
- The temperature option may either be set as the "feels like" temperature, or as the absolute temperature. The user is not permitted to have weather requirements on both restrictions simultaneously.