Long time no chat, My Dream Appers!
So we’re all getting back from last week’s gigantic extravaganza that some call “The iPhone Show” and others call Macworld. And that means I’ve got something to show you!
Now first, a large word of warning: I didn’t actually begin coding on Atmosphere until about two weeks ago, and last week at Macworld was pretty much a wash as far as productive work was concerned. So what you’re going to see is the result of probably no more than 15 hours of coding (most of which was me doing math, not actually writing code). What I’m trying to get at here is that it ain’t going to knock your socks off, it’s not too exciting. In fact, if it’s interesting at all, it’s interesting simply as a snapshot of what development of an application looks like in the very introductory phases.
Anyway, this build requires some explanation. It has a floating debugging panel (not for the final build) that allows you to manually set the date and time (the year, 2007, is hard-coded in this build). The app is hardcoded such that you, the viewer, are sitting smack-dang in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona, facing east. You can see from the south-east compass point to the north-east compass point (90 degrees) horizontally, and along a 45 degree slice of ground/sky vertically.
As you move the sliders, you will see the sun appear in its correct point in the sky for the given time and date. You will also see the scenery change between pre-rendered winter, spring, and summer views (fall is still in the works). The weather you see is based solely on the season, it has nothing to do with the actual weather in Phoenix (not much snow here, haha).
Now, all that said, my math for computing the sun position is wrong, so if you’re one of those über-astronomy types and you’re planning on checking my work, don’t bother - it’s wrong. Workin’ on it. :)
Finally, you’ll see the sky color change somewhat nastily between day and night as the sun rises. The timing of this change is pretty ad-hoc, and is only loosely correlated to the actual sunrise time (which I compute pretty inexactly anyway).
So what don’t you see? Well, pretty much everything that’s going to make Atmosphere drool-worthy, unfortunately. Dynamic weather effects, clouds, rain, sun effects, weather-based color changes, animations. You know, “the goods”.
So anyway, hope you enjoy the introductory build, and I hope to have something a bit more wow-worthy soon!
Download Atmosphere 1.0d1
