Inspiration
The inspiration for Alpine came from the need to create a simple, beautiful and eloquent weather application for the iPhone. While many other apps have been developed for such a purpose, none truly met high standards of efficiency and style. However, this is not to say that Alpine's elements were developed completely independent of these applications. A rarely recognized yet powerful idea was the large temperature display in the center of the screen on launch. Derived from the weather app by Apple, it was understood that the convenience of such a display could not be understated. Furthermore, the sleek and minimalistic art style was inspired by the game Alto's adventure, which utilized a similar design and parallax-effect scrolling.
What it does
In terms of basic functionality, the app provides the most significant details on weather including a
How it was built
Alpine was built as a combination of back and front-ends that were combined at the last steps towards completion. In terms of the back-end side, Alpine was designed to hold a cache of data that would be updated as needed; weather data was designed to be updated, at most, every 15 minutes depending on whether or not a particular location was requested, as the forecast.io API received latitude and longitudinal coordinates as inputs. To further reduce memory and processing strain, if a location was requested within a close radius of another, the data was updated for the other instead of finding information and storing in cache an entire other location. The most eloquent design aspect of the back-end revolved not only around its bear minimum updates, but on its single URL designed to be accessed with the latitude and longitude coordinates in its path. From there, the server would decide what would need to be done. In terms of the front-end, the
Obstacles to development
Throughout the development of Alpine,
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