ANNOUNCE: xfce4-weather-plugin 0.8.0 released

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello Harald
These are interesting points you make. Several comments below.


On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Harald Judt <h.judt at gmx.at> wrote:
> To elaborate a bit about the current provider: It is mainly a forecast API,
> so what you get is forecasts, not the actual weather. You get data like
> temperature for every hour (or three, or six depending on the location), and
> calculated values for these intervals.
>
Hmm, this makes me thinking of a feature request. One of the killer
features of The Weather Channel app in Android is that it provides
forecasts broken down by hour for the 12 hours or so. This is very
useful as it gives one a hint on how the weather is likely to evolve
during the day: Do I take my umbrella or my sun glasses? Would
something similar be remotely possible in the current UI with the
current provider?



> One problem is you may only get data
> like temperature for three hours from now, so you cannot know the current
> temperature.
>
That's slightly strange, indeed. But I guess users can get used to it.


> The current description of the plugin is a bit misleading in that regard.
> Maybe it should just state that it shows weather forecasts, that would be
> more correct.
>
Maybe this would be necessary, but also UI hints that the values
indicated are short-time forecasts.


> As for the openweathermap provider, it seems pretty new. Some parts are not
> documented yet, just look at the missing links in "About OpenWeatherMap.org"
> on the bottom of the website.
>
Yes, the project doesn't yet seem mature enough for our purposes. I
wanted to bring it forth mainly as a future candidate for weatehr
provider, should such needs arise again. The fact that it is an "open"
project should count, too. (Of course, provided it gets useful and
mature enough.)


> Live data and availability of historical data would be nice indeed. Maybe we
> could consider using this as an addition to the met.no API, and maybe
> switching to it in the future. Before doing so, more experience with
> openweather.org is certainly required.
>
> As a side note: Having a single provider is preferable for maintenance
> reasons.
>
Yes, this would be one possibility. For example fetch current weather
from one provider, and fetch forecasts from another. But this
shouldn't be done if it significantly increases maintenance overhead.


> Finally, I think the android application you referred to still uses google
> weather, at least it reported such a link when it was blocked by the
> firewall.
>
Yes, their bug report is still open [1]. I actually suggested them to
use yr.no . :)
[1] https://code.google.com/p/weather-notification-android/issues/detail?id=72

Regards
Liviu

PS What about DDG? If you issue a search for weather you get this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=weather+oslo

I'm not sure if it has an API available, but I would suspect it does.
(Should you be interested, I could inquire on this. Let me know.) It
is quite friendly towards open-source, and has even opened a platform
for open-source extensions. [2]

And I notice that DDG uses [3], which itself provides a free API.
Maybe this one could be of interest to us?

[2] http://duckduckhack.com/
[3] http://www.worldweatheronline.com/