Canadays is launched

Today we are happy to launch a new app 😄. With Canadays, you will finally know when the next holiday is coming, but also the stories or significances behind.

Holidays 🏖

The app is listing all the public holidays celebrated in some provinces and/or federally. A description is available in the holiday view, and if you want to know more about it, you can visit the dedicated Wikipedia article or official link.

More information will come in future releases.

Weather ☀️

The meteorological weather data is provided by Environment Canada. With more than 800 observation points across all the country, you will get an accurate weather estimate. and a short description of the coming hours.

Historical events

On the holiday and today views, you will see the most important events that happened on this day. The highlighted links will open a Wikipedia page 📖 if you want to know more.

News

Because it’s also nice to know what’s happening around, there is a dedicated view displaying the latest news from Canada and the world.

Privacy? 🕵️‍♀️

The app can also work without internet connection. Currently, the internet connection is only needed to retrieve the weather and news but that’s all.

There is no advertisement nor tracking.

📲 Download

You can download the app on macOS, iOS, and Android platforms.

Behind the scenes  🚧

Technically, the app is made by using the Flutter framework. We are using it in several internal and consulting projects and even if Flutter is still young, we didn’t experience any major issues.

The app is coming 3 weeks after the release of Flutter 2 and the official support of null-safety. Consequently, it is not a surprise to see Canadays shipped with Flutter 2. Canadays is currently able to run without any issues on all the platforms (macOS, iOS, Android, Web, Windows, Linux).

Holidays data 🏖

This was probably the biggest task of the project. Getting reliable data takes a lot of effort, even by using paid services.

Ideally, this is what we are expecting from the databases:

• get up-to-date, accurate and detailed content
• possibility to add easily more information, even on existing data
• multi-language support
• pictures, …

After several tries to create a database from 3rd-party services, writing scripts to fetch and aggregate everything, the result was not up to standard as there was at least 1 important expectation not matched.

🙅‍♂️ Try again! Let’s create a dart holidays package 📅

At this stage, the decision was to start from the beginning, creating by ourselves the holidays database and by trying to match all the expectations.

It led to the creation of a dart holidays package that would generate the holidays dynamically instead of using data fixed in the time. We took inspiration from similar packages available in other languages. After all, most of the holidays are predictable.

⚠️  Sometimes we have noticed the holidays dates were incomplete, missing provinces, or not valid. It required that every holiday was valid.

Once the holidays were generated, the last part was to gather the data. At this point, most of the content is fetched from Wikipedia and in English, but it will evolve on par with the app updates. Now the logic is flexible enough to add/update new content, sources or languages (the 🇫🇷  French data is almost completed).

More to come  🧑‍💻

Since Arcinix was founded last summer, the company has collaborated with several companies to support them in their projects.

This app is only the first step, and more features/apps will come very soon, not only targeting 🇨🇦 Canada, but also the 🇪🇺 European countries and the 🇺🇸 United States.

Stay in touch! ✌️