PH Weather

Probe House Software
by Wong CK
© Copyright 2012

Version 1.2

What is this?

PH Weather is a simple program that displays the weather of a city. It displays a graphical representation of the weather and the temperature of the City. This program was inspired from the weather gadgets on Windows.

The Atari Falcon with upgraded CT63 & CTPCI / Supervidel and new developed FireBee, there are now possibilities to run the desktop with higher resolution, more colours and with network connectivity. To consume these new resources - large screen size, high colour and network, there is a need for new programs such as this weather app - being always on the screen consuming your new large real estate utilising high-colour to display the weather situation and chomping your network bandwidth to check the weather on the Internet.

PH Weather is freeware.

Requirements

  1. This runs on MINT with MintNET and requires an internet connection. Development was done on Mint 1,18, while lower MINT versions are not fully verified/tested on.
  2. You also need to have zView's codec, by Zoro, correctly installed (the codecs). All these are available from zView package (latest release 8).
  3. The zView package requries a VDI with EdDI support. This is available in NVDI, NovaVDI, fVDI etc.
A colour display will be nice, but you can run it on lower colour system like 16 - just that the rain clouds will not be so nice looking. As I have not tried running at low colour, I have no idea how it looks like. Recommend that you use 256 colours.

Installation

  1. Extract and copy all the files into a folder of your choice. For example d:\phweathr.
  2. Make sure that the IMG subfolder is created inside the folder. For example d:\phweathr\img.
  3. Firebee version can be found inside the Firebee folder. Just replace the 680x0 version
  4. Make sure that the PNG images are inside this IMG folder.
  5. Copy all zView codecs into C:\GEMSYS\LDG\CODECS folder. Create that folder if you do not already have it.
  6. Double click phweathr.prg to run it !!
You could make PH Weather run everytime you boot up by using the run command in your Xaaes.cnf file.
The loading of images into memory may take some time, the loading time depends on the speed of your Atari system.

The App Window

This is the main window of the application. You should place it somewhere visible on your desktop but out of the way of your main working area.
  • The app window shows the weather condition of the city of your choice
  • The temperature shown either in your choice of Celsius or Fahrenheit
  • The weather condition in text as well as the graphical representation
  To move the app, click & hold anywhere on the app until the mouse turns into a hand. Drag and release it to the new location.
The app will retrieve the weather information from the Internet approximately once every 12 mins.

Usage - options

Right click on the weather app window for a popup menu.
  • Select Configuration to get into the configuration window (see next section)
  • Select Details see the current forecast of the selected city
  • Select Forecast to the next 4 days forecast of the selected city
  • Select Quit to exit the application
  • The About displays.... well, the about of the app
The 1st execution, you will be reminded to right click to configure a city.

Configuration Window

  • Enter the city of which the weather you are interested in
    1. The spelling of the city need not be accurate. For example, you can spell Kathmandu as Catmando, and it will still work.
    2. For cities with the same name, you need to specify the country. For example, "london uk" will show weather of London in UK while "london canada" will show the weather of London in Ontario. Specifying only "London" will find the famous city of London in UK.
    3. Specifying the old name of a city will resolves to the new city name. For example, Bombay will find Mumbai.
    4. You can also specify the airport code to get the weather at the airport, example are LHR, MUC, LAX and my favourite US airport- MCO.
  • Select either the measurement units - Celcius or Fahrenheit

Details and Forecast Windows

Double click on the weather app window or select the Details/Forecast from the pop-up menu, for the forecast/details window.
The details and forecast will be available in a couple of seconds after a change of the selected city.
Click on the Deatks/Forecast button to swap between the two display.


Config and working files

The config file is called phweathr.cfg located at the same folder of the app. It is created by the app itself on exit. Information of the city of interested is stored along with other information. If this file is deleted, the app will loose the selected city information.

Limitations

What's New & Fixes

Version 1.2 (what happened to v1.1??)
  1. Faster startup due to on-demand graphics. Load/convert only the graphics it needs (previous version load/convert all graphics.
  2. Use timezone of remote city to determine time, removes need to make query to Google.
  3. Day and night images are determined by the sun rise and sunset time of the city. Time of the city relies on timezone of the Atari computer.
  4. UTF-8 code used for Atari Font set.
  5. Airport codes usable as entry for city
  6. Fixed MyAES data entry issue.
Version 1.01
  1. Silently exiting if RSC cannot be loaded when running off ext2 fs (or any fs which allows upper and lowercase).
  2. Memory violation when exiting from a Memory Protected Mint.
  3. Error getting object tree in MyAES.
  4. Unable to enter non-English characters (like umlaut (ü)).

Thanks

Thanks to the gang at Atari-Forums.com and OL and jfl for the support.

Future developements

Look at the list of limitations, I should knock one or two of them off the list when I have some time. So do check back for updates.

Questions, comments, or error reports? Please leave a post at Atari-Forum.com
Visit my web site at https://sites.google.com/site/probehouse/