| How do you decide what to wear when you wake up, or when you're planning to go on a romantic weekend getaway?
I made an app for that called Fashion Frog, who gives you the most suitable outfit to wear depending on the current weather condition and the time of the day relevant to you. I learned a lot while coding this little side project app on Android and iOS, like using the OpenWeather API. I created the algorithms to propose the suitable outfit for the day anywhere in the world. It took some time to assembly and think about the looks and the illustrations. But I want to talk to you about my biggest pain: the timezone module. It was very difficult to get the app working on every timezone of the world. Indeed, I wanted to give weather from morning to night but I needed to know what time was at every town of the world (to display only 4 simple informations : morning, afternoon, evening, night). At fist, I wanted to use the Google Timezone API but it was very expensive. My first solution was to use Kevin Robert module called city-timezone, it covered 80% of the users requests. Sometimes the city is not found, in this case I choose a timezone list from the web that I parsed, then I used another list for the towns of the world with a timezone indication code inside. So I was able to match the town with the timezone when a user select a town. And finally, if the timezone of the town is still not found, I use timezonedb API (link below) who let me cover at the end almost all the town of the world. I also set things to not call too much the weather API (like if you want to get the weather 8 mins later at the same position, I didn’t call again the API, I save it for 10 mins inside the app). The app is still in progress, because I want to add an Inspiration section and to create a more complex outfit proposition algorithm (I like it so far, but I think it can be improved). I already got design feedback by a UX/UI designer that helped me to think about the future experience inside this little app. I also used the Humaaans illustration base and recreated clothes on top, it was very creative and fun to do. Fun fact: I wanted to create this app at the beginning only for Men living in Paris, France because it was my actual pain: what outfit I should prepare to look my best throughout the full day? And now, my biggest users this month (51%) are Women living in US and UK. It took me a huge amount of time to create english speaker and Women version of the app, but it was a great idea to offer the app to as many people as possible from the beginning, because my target users revealed itself. LINKS :
- Weather API: https://openweathermap.org
- Timezone module: https://github.com/kevinroberts/city-timezones
- Timezone last chance API: http://timezonedb.com
- Humaans illustration library: https://www.humaaans.com/
- Google Timezone API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/timezone/in... |
Do you plan to allow for personnal preferences? People generally have a different sensitivity to temperature.
It would be nice to be able to swipe between T, T+1 and T+2 instead of going to settings.