ANNOUNCE: xfce4-weather-plugin 0.8.0 released

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Harald Judt <h.judt at gmx.at> [2012-07-27 09:29]:
> Hi,
> 
> Am 26.07.2012 20:38, schrieb Liviu Andronic:
> [...]
> >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
> 
> Since weather-notification-android uses it, I wonder why not use
> google's API? It's undocumented and unofficial, but looking at
> example data it seems very simple and you won't need any
> documentation to understand it, and no license (I think, but did not
> verify). The diversity of data it provides doesn't match that of
> met.no, and some values like wind may need more effort to parse, yet
> it could probably be used to replace the "current conditions" we
> have now.
> 
> Does anyone have experience with it? Why does the author of
> weather-notification-android want to switch from it to another
> provider?
> 
> Otherwise, I can only think of making the providers interface
> pluggable, and someone has to write plugins for the plugin,
> accessing data from a local weather data provider perhaps. Seems
> quite a hassle for such a simple plugin, though. And then there's
> still the problem of APIs requiring subscriptions and licenses.
> 
> BTW: Here's a list of possible weather APIs:
> http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/weather
> A quick glance at some of them shows that most require licenses or
> are undocumented etc. But maybe someone wants to go through it and
> finds something useful.

If you're considering alternative sources you might want to have
a look at libgweather which collects data from metoffice.gov.uk,
weather.noaa.gov, weather.gov, and bom.gov.au.
While the licrary cannot be used directly yet as it depends on
GTK 3, the code and data sources might still be of interest.  In
particular, it provides an internal database of locations and
timezone hints as well as scripts to generate it from public
sources.
See http://git.gnome.org/browse/libgweather/tree/libgweather

-- 
Guido Berhoerster