[Weather app] Searching cities should be predictive

[Christina Li]

Current situation:
1. In edit, when searching for cities location the prediction of results do not come up automatically. Instead a user needs to press the search icon for results.
This becomes difficult if a user is not familiar with the exact spelling of a city name.

2. A list of cities should be available alphabetically for selection- currently nothing is displayed.

Desired behaviour:
1. As soon as user starts typing a city name, the predictive results display below the search input filed as per spec.
2. A list of cities is available alphabetically for selection.

See 'Manage Location':
http://design.canonical.com/2013/03/app-patterns-applied-weather-key-journeys/

[Martin Borho (martin-borho)]

Predicitve search not possible with current data provider.

[Martin Borho (martin-borho)]

Hi Christina,

there are two issues with this

a) predictive search in a defined set of cities won't only cover a small portions of the locationsthe users will search for

b) whereas a predictive search over an online data source will only return results with the search term at the beginning of the location name, so an alphabetical selection won't make that much sense...

Greetings
Martin

[Christina Li (christina-li)]

Martin, thanks for the update.
Is this relating to the data source we're using?

As a minimum, we should at least provide an alphabetical list for users to select from as per spec. This relates to bug 1195244

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-weather-app/+bug/1195244

[Martin Borho (martin-borho)]

Christina, yes.

This relateds to the data sources we're using. The currently used and the future ones, too. Predicitve searches provided by online APIs are mostly only searching for the beginning of the names for performance reasons.

I think, providing a (aphabethical) city list with predefined locations when opening the search sheet and displaying the search results without "A-Z" headers would be ok.

[Christina Li (christina-li)]

When searching cities name, most people would start from the beginning of the city name. So, I don't see any problems with the predictive search beginning with that.

Is there a reason why we can't preload with the full list? We are providing a A-Z list, as people would most likely go from the beginning of the city name.

[Martin Borho (martin-borho)]

Yes, there are various reasons:

a) I know only one weather app (on the nokia n9) providing a useful list of cities on the device, which is really slow and pain to use. All other weater apps I know rely on online searches, because it's faster.
b) an accurate list of A-Z cities, one which is convenient also for people not living in cities, are always really big and have to be curated, packaged and maintained.
c) do we have such a list?
d) I for myself do always watching for at least one smaller place. A weather app not knowing this place is not one I would use. Developing such an app by myself is an idea I'm honestly not very comfortable with :)

Cheers
Martin

[Ubuntu Phone Apps Jenkins Bot (ubuntu-phone-apps-jenkins-bot)]

Fix committed into lp:ubuntu-weather-app at revision 119, scheduled for release in ubuntu-weather-app, milestone alpha-1