ANNOUNCE: xfce4-weather-plugin 0.8.2 released

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello


On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Harald Judt <h.judt at gmx.at> wrote:
> I have several versions of automake installed together with some wrapper,
> but for the plugin 1.12.3 was used. I wonder if this is only specific to a
> certain version. If it is, then I think adding another instruction step to
> the build instructions would do. If not, it will need a fix. I will see how
> other plugins handle it, maybe that gives a clue.
>
To solve this I had to upgrade to xfce4-dev-tools-4.10.0 (even if I'm
running Xfce 4.8). See "trouble compiling plugins on Xubuntu Precise"
thread. This may be worth mentioning in the installation instructions.

I also uploaded binaries for Precise to my Ubuntu PPA. [1] (They will
build shortly.)
[1] https://launchpad.net/~landronimirc/+archive/xfce

As for the plugin itself, I think the changes are great.
- The morning/afternoon/evening/night breakdown is very useful.
- Is it necessary to have such temperature precision: 19.8 degrees or
17.3. Personally I usually look at the weather estimates and try to
round to the nearest multiple of 5. Say, if the estimate is 17
degrees, then I will try to remember 15 degrees. If the estimate is
18, I will think of it as a 20 degree estimate. So in this sense, is
the decimal precision really useful? Wouldn't it be better to round
19.8 to 20 and 17.3 to 17? (The same doesn't hold for speed estimates,
where decimal precision looks nince.)
- For each forecast element (cell) there are 3 lines of information,
and it seems to me that this tends to renders less readable the
temperature estimates. Perhaps it would be better to use bold for the
temp estimates. Or maybe to move the 'Sunny', 'Clear', etc. labels to
a tooltip that would appear when hovering the relevant icon. (Right
now having both icon and label seems redundant.)
- It may be interesting to put the forecast dates to the right-hand of
the forecast table. Say, you would have 'Today' on the left-hand side
and '19 Sep' on the right hand side, 'Tomorrow' and '20 Sep', 'Friday'
and '21 Sep'. Sometimes people function in terms of weekdays, while
other times they prefer actual dates.

Moreover, I see a strange artefact here: Outside my window it is
'Cloudy', and the plugin uses the 'Cloudy' icon and label. However,
the temp estimate is 19.8 degrees (2 hours in the future) with an
associated 'Sunny' icon/label. Shouldn't the icon used by the plugin
reflect this future estimate?

Reading "Precipitation and the weather symbol have been calculated for
the following time interval:" it seems to me that the behaviour above
is intended. But it is a bit confusing to mix 'actual' weather symbol
and 'future' temp estimate. Couldn't an 'actual' temp estimate be
computed using the past "future" estimates?

All in all excellent work! Thanks
Liviu