Thread: Weather app broken

All fixed (i believe). New ZIP in "Latest Build" post.

The issue was a threading problem. If an image didn't download correctly, the whole internet thread would lock up.

working again but i see a couple of days without icons, could you not include the icons in DL and pull from a folder instead of getting icons online? Great work SNO

Yeah, the icon thing was bound to be an issue. There are a few solutions, now that I'm playing more with the Yahoo Weather API. Personally, I wouldn't mind some sexy animated icons. The trick is matching descriptions to icons. A forecast description might say "Snow" or "Snow Showers" or "Heavy Snow" or "Snow Flurries", and the program has to determine which icon corresponds to the description. Yahoo weather uses roughly 40 different icons.

In the back of my mind, I've got an idea for a word-matching function that could try to find the best icon based on individual words in the description. It would be overly complicated, and might still not get an icon 100% of the time. It would be more useful if I were including my own weather icons. I'll probably do this just as an experiment, since it won't make anything any worse. I've considered including weather icons in DriveLine, but I would have to find a very complete set that is also free. I wonder if I'm allowed to include the Yahoo icons. If anything, I'd be saving them some network bandwidth.

For a better solution, I might just have to pull down (HTML parsing) the forecast icons from weather.com, now that I see the LocationID from yahoo's API might apply to Weather.com as well.

Until I get it all worked out, if you want to send me the text from the forecast description, I'll check and see why it didn't match.

I am just moving my main computer hard drive to a new bigger drive, as soon as its done I will send you the collection of icons I have, its pretty complete and I will send the text to you thats not populating. Thanks SNO

Location based weather is working great, icons seem to populate better with none missing. Good job Clockwork! SNO

Can you use flash for weather icons in DL? I have some animated flash or just high res png's if you need them. SNO

DriveLine does have some Flash support. However, I'd rather not use something so resource-intensive. Animated GIFs will be better. But I don't think it's a super-high priority. Any external images will require the program to attempt to match the images to the info from the weather API. And weather is working well enough at the moment. I'm playing around with Yahoo's Weather RSS api, and it's got some pro's (guaranteed icons for current, today, and tomorrow) and some drawbacks (no forecast beyond tomorrow).

But if I can find a good pack of animated GIFs, I will definitely try to incorporate them into the weather service within DriveLine.

Ok pm sent with files and links SNO

New version uploaded. Now has a "Weather" section in the Settings list. Supports 3 different sources for weather icons, as well as local images (including animated GIFs). I included a few animated GIFs for Sunny, Cloudy, Rain, and ThunderStorms.