Developing Umbrella service for Koornk, got me thinking, how could I expend this service even more, to give it more meaning?
What I came up with, is a simple extension of existing data-sets that had to be acquired already to make the basic service work. Inspired by all the talks of Widgets in recent times, I decided to make an effort and design a widget!
The basic layout is simple (drawing by r8r: Morticia – CC-BY-NC):
The next step is, to get a graphic artist and draw about 20 different poses and clothes for the girl. Idea being here that you take into account what kind of temperature/weather is there, and then depending on need for umbrella add it to her clothes or make her wear a rain coat!
Recipe list is then quite simple:
- Get weather forecast data from one of different sources
- Find an artist to draw you weather girl or assemble yourself from free cliparts
- Figure out FBML or iGoogle XML
- Write a script that ties it all together and updates weather information each morning
- Add some social/viral features
- Spam all your contacts
- ???
- Profit!
- Weather parts of TV stations (24ur vreme, RTV Slo vreme) as a way to extend their online offerings and to promote their weather online and TV offerings. Since everyone already knows they both have weather it’s more of a branding effort for them.
- As an exercise for Domenca team (btw: they have a new page!) to promote the fact that they sell umbrella’s (well, at least one) on Mimovrste and gain customers with that (+ branding).
- For a new team on a market, to show that they’re able to build a “viral” Facebook app and a way to prove that they can build Facebook and other widgets.
- Fun afternoon project for a local geek, to speed up his or her job creation.
- Well, there’s always an option – because, it’s fun and a way to unwind.
- OmniGraffle has incredible stencils and there are even more on Graffletopia
- You don’t need a designer to create mockups. A bit of thinking gets you a long way (Creative Commons Flickr images in this case, combined with OmniGraffle stencils)
- Adding social and sharing features to widgets is tricky. I’ll leave this for a later exercise.
- For any idea, you can easily find lots of potential groups you can try and sell it to.
- This is fun! 🙂
How funny to see a drawing of mine pop up here! Using it as a 'weather girl' seems like a good application for the style.
And I can tell you that a developer who cut in the artist for a part of the profits would find an eager participant.
Yes you are trying something different . Keep on doing it , because when you walk away with a difference you get the gestures of others.
Great widget on the fashion
And the apperal are too cool of the girl