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Build a Weather App

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Introducing Stormy

2:46 with Ken Alger

We are going to build a simple and fun weather app called Stormy that gets the current weather conditions from a free service provided by Dark Sky.

Dark Sky Website

Prerequisites

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    Hi, I'm Ken. 0:09
    I've an exciting project for us to work on for this course. 0:11
    One of my most used apps is my weather app. 0:14
    Now, I've tried several different ones, on a number of different devices. 0:17
    And while I've liked some, none have been exactly what I've wanted. 0:21
    Or maybe they've worked well, but they don't look so good. 0:25
    This is a great opportunity to build our own. 0:29
    As luck would have it, getting weather data from the Internet, 0:32
    and displaying it in an application is a great learning experience. 0:35
    These days most apps have some online component, which requires us to get 0:40
    familiar with sending and receiving data over device's network connection. 0:44
    I'm going to assume that you're comfortable with the concepts covered in 0:50
    our previous Android courses. 0:53
    If you haven't taken our other courses, check the prerequisites 0:55
    list in Teacher's Notes, and complete those courses prior to starting this one. 0:58
    Let's get started. 1:03
    Our user interface will be relatively simple. 1:04
    Once again, we have some great design mock-ups to work from, thanks for 1:08
    our amazing designers here at Treehouse. 1:11
    We'll call this app Stormy, 1:14
    and it will simply display current weather conditions for a hard coded location. 1:15
    Stormy will load fresh data each time we run the app, and 1:20
    we'll also add a refresh button. 1:23
    We'll use the Dark Sky service for our stormy app. 1:26
    This service provides weather data for developers, is fairly easy to use, and 1:29
    powers some popular weather applications. 1:34
    If we scroll down here and click on the Dark Sky API link down in the footer, 1:36
    and scroll down here on their page a little bit, 1:41
    We can find a list of some of the organizations that rely on their data. 1:49
    This service is pretty reliable, and 1:52
    as we see at the top of this page, It's free to get started. 1:54
    Thanks, Dark Sky. 2:00
    A typical weather app will detect your location and 2:02
    provide location-specific weather automatically. 2:05
    However, the focus of this course is to learn about networking. 2:08
    As such, Stormy will not automatically detect our location. 2:13
    We'll just use a specific location and hard code it into the application. 2:17
    Hard coding simply means we'll type the location coordinates 2:21
    directly into the app. 2:25
    Adding location detection functionality to the app would be an easy feature 2:27
    enhancement to do later on. 2:31
    And I encourage you to try it once the app is finished. 2:33
    Before we dive into Stormy, I'm going to ask you to warm your brain and 2:36
    fingers with a quick code challenge. 2:39
    Once you're finished, meet me in the next video and we'll get started. 2:41

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