Guessing a User’s Location on iOS

A few months ago at work we ran into an odd user experience problem. The home screen for one of our iPad apps included a small icon in the navigation bar showing the current weather. Normally it displays the weather for the user’s current location or any location they’ve saved. No problem. But what do we show the first time the app launches? At that point, they have no saved location preference and we don’t know their physical location because they haven’t yet opted-in to CoreLocation. We came up with three options. Don’t show anything, or show a generic no-location-set …

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Why I Took the Job

Almost four years ago today, I moved across the country and accepted a job at Yahoo!. But one of the main reasons I took the position happened six years before that. In the Fall of 2001 I was a Sophomore in college at MTSU. Each morning I’d roll out of bed and open my Yahoo! home page. It was the first step in my morning routine. I’d check the news, check my email, then get ready for class. On Tuesday the 11th I woke up at 7:45. The first thing I saw on Yahoo! was a headline that a plane …

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