Weather 2.0🌄

First of all, I want to welcome all of our members who joined us after the release; thank you so much for giving us a try 😀

However, if you joined us in 2019, you might remember that our first Niagara Pro feature was the weather widget. Half a year later, Apple acquired Dark Sky, our (spoilers: old) weather provider, and announce to shut down their API. We decided to move to OpenWeather, but just switching the weather forecast’s source wouldn’t be that exciting, right? Max and I thought that occasion gives a wonderful opportunity to revamp the weather widget; here’s what we added:

30-Minute Rain Forecast

[📝 This feature is supported in most but not all regions. During testing, I noticed that in some regions of Africa, for example, OpenWeather doesn’t provide us minutely forecast data.]

Integrated into Niagara’s weather timeline, the 30-minute rain forecast helps you not getting stuck in the rain (or snow) on your way home or during outdoor sports.

Shorter Refresh Intervals

Based on how stable the weather conditions are, Niagara Launcher updates the forecast dynamically every 30 to 60 minutes (That’s 2–4 times shorter than our old refresh interval). In between, we estimate current weather conditions based on the hourly forecast to increase accuracy even more.

Because weather data requests only take a few kilobytes in size to download and Niagara Launcher never wakes up your phone from standby, you don’t have to worry that the higher refresh rate impacts your phone’s battery.

Longer Forecast Range

We extended our daily forecast range from three to eight days (today and the next seven days). Moreover, the hourly forecast now also includes the weather conditions for the entire next day.

Subtle Tweaks

We also added…

• sunrise and sunset times to the hourly weather forecast — Now, you never miss Golden hour when biking on a warm summer night.
• daily weather descriptions and additional weather icons for a more precise forecast (light, medium, and heavy rain, few clouds, and thunder)
• design tweaks to the hourly forecast box (moved it further to the top, shrank it a little, added an arrow to indicate that it’s scrollable)
• the option to automatically choose a fixed location with location services — it generally gives more accurate forecasts than entering your city manually.
• the shortcut to launch OpenWeather’s app when long-pressing the weather widget (more info here)

More Goodies:

Even though we tried to focus on Niagara’s weather widget for this update, we couldn’t keep back these small additions:

Close App Animations

[📝 For animating closed apps, we’re using a brand new API that is currently only supported by Pixel phones and a few stock Android 11 devices. As of now, no other phone manufacturer offers a similar API.]

Swiping up to open the home screen animates the last opened app back to its icon on supported devices. For a smoother transition to the home screen, we also move down the favorites and app list a little when returning home (every device supports that animation).

While integrating Google’s Launcher3 API that is responsible for the new animation, we noticed it can behave strangely now and then. If the animation doesn’t work well after switching the default launcher, we recommend doing a device restart.

Battery Charge Indicator

You can enable Niagara Pro’s battery widget and ⚡ indicator by long-pressing Niagara’s widget > Show battery percentage.

Widget settings sheet

Long press on Niagara’s widget to quickly access all of its settings.

Transparent Screenshots

The last feature I want to share is a strange one and probably irrelevant for most but might come in handy if you want to share mockups in our community or create pixel-perfect setups.

It’s a hidden tool that lets you create screenshots of Niagara Launcher without the wallpaper (you’ll get a .png file with transparent background). I created it to create promotional graphics but made it a little more accessible in case you’d like to use it as well. For example, I scaled up my favorites in Niagara Launcher’s feature graphic to make the list stand out a bit more:

Here’s a guide on how to use it.

Bugfixes

• Calendar widget: Force-refresh the “Show upcoming events” widget every four hours in case your calendar app didn’t notify Niagara Launcher about event changes.
• Notifications: Some notifications with buttons flickered on devices running Android 9 or lower. [Ticket on GitHub]
• Sesame search: When doing web searches with the Sesame integration, an incomplete search query was sometimes forwarded to your browser. [Ticket on GitHub]
• Assistant gesture: When gesture navigation is enabled, Niagara’s alphabet scroll gesture doesn’t overlap with Android’s launch-assistant-gesture (diagonal swipe from the corners at the bottom) anymore. [Ticket on GitHub]

Download Link for Niagara Launcher v1.1 [Beta]

The update is available right away. Because it’s brand-new, it can be unstable. You can download it on our new Discord Server, via Telegram or GitHub, but you can also wait for around one week, and you’ll automatically receive a stable build through Google Play. Download links: https://help.niagaralauncher.app/article/107-beta-tester

[Update Mar 13:] It’s now also available on Google Play!

I hope you enjoy the redesigned weather widget along with the tweaks. Thank you very much for reading.

🔹 Peter