Application preview: MeeCast for Harmattan

Hello everyone.

I haven’t posted updates of my work for quite a long time but now I finally have enough time to fulfill your interest by showing you some of the upcoming projects that I’ve been working on. So let’s start with something you’ve been quite familiar with all these years and that got a complete overhaul to step onto Harmattan platform. It’s OMWeather and this time it’s not just a tweak of good ol’ weather widget – it’s a completely redesigned application so we had to choose some more “marketable” name for this OMWeather successor. Let me introduce you: MeeCast.

1. Branding

MeeCast absorbed all key features that you’ve loved in OMWeather like extreme customization, detailed settings, icon sets, GPS tracking and more. But now it has evolved from just a weather widget on your home screen to full featured open source cross-platform solution for developing weather related applications all thanks to Qt and QML. Right now we’re focusing on delivering MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan application as fast as possible but we’re also cooking something really extraordinary for you and I hope we’ll soon be able to show it to the world. But that will happen later this year, right now let me give you a sneak peek on what’s coming up for Nokia N9  (and of course for N950 ninjas too :P)

2. Concept

Since Harmattan got rid of home screen widgets of all sorts ( or is it? ) we’ve decided to mimic the “instant access” experience of the widget in our stand-alone application. So we’ve designed an app that will load as fast as possible and show all necessary info without carpet bombing your eyes with fancy special effects that QML allows us to do. So here’s the home screen:

There’s nothing much to describe, everything looks pretty intuitive (for me at least :P). Your location along with basic but most valuable data right in front of you. Day temperatures are color coded along with the background to give you instant “feel” of the outside conditions. Not so representative with boring Moscow weather but still :)

The “Day details” view shows you all the info available at the moment for chosen day. We’ve decided to use text labels instead of icons for maximum readability in all languages (and we have 8 different locales. If you wish to help with adding your native language – feel free to email us at vlad[at]gas.by). Also day and night parameters are now divided in two tabs for additional comfort.

All for now, but stay tuned, there’s still landscape mode and testing package waiting to be revealed :)

Thanks for reading.