Written by dubrict the 26 Jan 09 at 04:40.
Related project: Gnome.
Status: New
Rationale
The weather applet has an extremely limited list of towns for which you can get the weather, requiring many users to figure out what town is closest to them.
cheesehead(Brainstorm moderator)
wrote on the 26 Jan 09 at 14:18
Please add the link to published Google Weather API.
Gnome has been working on a better weather-location system for several cycles now. Their libgweather uses airport locations (because that's where the weather station usually is), but you can always add your preferred location by filing a bug. The bug must include the weather station you want data from.
For the applet, go to weather.com and type in your city. Select it from the list and you should be directed to a page with the address like http://www.weather.com/weather/local/ABCD1234 Copy that code ABCD1234 and paste it into the area bar of the weather applet, and you should have weather from your town.
Hey, Great idea.
I live in Australia and the only cities listed are major ones. There are airports near me that do submit meteorological information to databases so and I would love to be able to view this information from the weather applet.
When I tried a certain alpha of Intrepid, the weather applet had alot more locations than usual. It even had my home town which I have not seen in any other ubuntu version (even post versions), I have to use a city that is 26 miles away. Did anyone else notice why this list was so much bigger in the alpha, and what data sources it was using?
The API is very simple. A query to http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=12345&hl=en returns an XML file with all the information. The location specified in "weather" can be a zip code, or of the form "new york,ny". hl specifies the language, and takes the standard language codes.
I'm not sure how it handles other countries, but I'm certain it does. I'll have to do more digging for the API
Since I live in a small community with less than 1000 inhabitants in Sweden for which it actually is possible to obtain accurate forecasts on the Internet, I decided to test the three proposed services. Of those, only Accuweather had any information, so at least in this case I believe that this would be the best choice, provided that it is possible to obtain the information freely from this source, of course.
Another possible source of information that might be worth considering is the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Please refer to http://www.yr.no/english/ for more information.
Unfortunately, I see that much of the information about the terms and conditions and the API for the Norwegian site only is available in the Norwegian language. I will be happy to help translating the text to English if anyone is interested in this. Please send me a private message in that case.