Umbrella Today in your email

Following up on last week’s historic announcement that Umbrella Today supports international areas and geocoding, we have another update today — Umbrella Today now has email notification support as well.

This was our next most requested feature after international support. We built Umbrella Today as part of the creation of materials for our Ruby training courses, and one of the original design goals was to have it be the absolute simplest “weather report” one could build. Even something as trivial as email support really had to prove itself with continued requests and discussion to be worth including in the application.

So anyway – now there’s a choice on the subscription page about wether you want to get SMS messages or email messages, and if you either don’t have an unlimited text message plan, or would just prefer to get email, maybe the new option is for you. The activate and deactivate workflows are the same, and the message you receive are the same, it’s just the delivery system that’s different.

Enjoy!

Happy Umbrella Day!

If you’re at all like us, you’ve spent the last few months of your life anticipating one of the truly great holidays in the world: Umbrella Day. This year, as the people behind the internet’s leading umbrella notification service — Umbrella Today — the holiday sort of takes on a special meaning for us, and it’s time to give the site some long overdue love.

International support

Our leading request to date has been to provide international umbrella/weather notification support, so that people who use umbrellas and experience weather but do not live in the US can get the same sweet umbrella notices that the rest of us have grown to rely on for our day to day existence. Unfortunately, due to complexities in the phone system the world built before the dawn of the SMS message, doing this turns out to be more elaborate than we’d like it to be.

However!, effective today, if you have a phone carrier that is on the list of carriers we support (anything on this list), you can now use Umbrella Today from anywhere in the world, and you’ll get the same type of message everyone else does.

Geonames

Another request has been to support geoname-style data entry, rather than requiring a zip code to get notices. After all, weather forecasts are usually by city or by airport, not by postal code. As part of implementing the International support mentioned above, we needed to switch weather APIs anyway, so we figured why not add geoname support at the same time? Now you can enter “Beverly Hills” instead of “90210”, and it will work the same way it used to.

The third most requested feature — playing the “Beverly Hills, 90210” theme song as an embedded midi file on the page when you live in that zip code — is still in the works…and still totally awesome.

Fun games to play with an umbrella

I don’t know any — but happy Umbrella Day, and best weather wishes to all Umbrella-Today-using citizens.

Umbrella Today, Winter edition

Umbrella Today now has snow support!

If you subscribe to umbrella today, we will do one of the following things…

• On days where there is no precipitation in your area, we will continue to not send you any text messages at all.
• If it’s going to rain, we’ll send you a message suggesting you bring an umbrella
• If it’s going to snow (ie, going to rain plus it’s < than 32˚F where you are), we’ll tell you that it’s going to snow.

In addition, the messages that tell you to bring your umbrella now include the percentage chance of precipitation for your area. That way you don’t have to rely purely on our threshold (40%) for notifying you, and you can make some more informed decisions about whether to bring your umbrella or not.

We also have a new handsome results page for when there is snow (pictured to the right).

Future stuff we’re planning…

• We want to add International support, and are still looking for the correct library to do this with.
• We want to add the ability to notify on the :15 or :30 or :45 rather than just on the hour, and will probably allow this in the next release.