The good news is I have already received comments and emails from people who like Skygaze. Based on their comments, I spent an evening adding the ability to store your location (zip code) in a Dynamo DB. Once you tell Skygaze your zip code once, you will not be asked again. You can clear the stored location at any time by simply asking:
“Alexa, ask sky gaze to change my location”
Once you do this, the next time you ask for information she will ask for your zip code again.
Other small tweaks include:
- When getting a sky report for what is visible now, I will give you the moon’s illumination if it is viewable.
- When Skygaze responds to you with viewing information, I tell you the city I am using for my report. I was already doing this in the card, but though it would be good via speech as well.
- A cool new icon 🙂
Persisting session attributes itself is very easy. As simple as adding one line of code to your handler. The trick is I did not want to persist all my session attributes so I reset these after the session is over:
var alexa = Alexa.handler(event, context);
alexa.appId = APP_ID;
alexa.registerHandlers(handlers);
alexa.dynamoDBTableName = "skygazedb";
alexa.execute();
Thanks for the kind comments and let me know what other things would be useful. I think adding deep-sky objects would be the best, but I need to think through the best way of adding them without making the sky report too long. Possibly paging the data or ask you what kind of information you want.
