Re: Weather, and a new xAPplication coming on

[James <james@xxxxxxx>]

David Buckley wrote:

>The author this very day produced a beta that at the push of a button
>plonks weather display on the xAP desktop, so I'm hopeful this'll all
>work out.  yay.
>
>
yay indeed.

>Couple of points.
>
>a) The weather.report schema has a UTC= field for the time, and it
>displays as time on the xAP desktop.  But in UTC... OK in the UK, six
>months of the year, but a bit out here in New Zealand....
>
>
You could add a small script to the weather display which could
add/remove hours from the supplied value
using the dateadd("h",1,date) vb command. Might be the best way

>b) The settings.txt file for weather is hard coded to expect an
>mi4.weather source, I hacked it to be *.weather source, it seems to
>work, is that OK, and should that be the default?
>
>
That is probably the best way to do it. It does require all weather apps
to be *.weather.* though. So maybe making the whole source address
selectable by the user but having the default of *.weather.* as most
users would only use one feed or you could just use > as default.

>And a question - anyone who has weather data running now, how often do
>you get updates?
>
>
The NASA feed seem to update every 10minutes and the bbc are alot slower
usually at least an hour between changes.  I tend to have weather set to
check every 30 minutes and use an on change homeseer event to trigger
things if the weather has changed.

One other thing that wasn't mentioned was is it possible in this app to
request the weather data from xAP?  This facility was added to the last
beta of xAPWeather and has proved very useful.  It was a confusion to
users of Desktop that they set up Weather correctly and then loaded the
weather display  and then Desktop just sat there with an empty box
waiting for data. With this facility Desktop can get the data from
Weather before it fades up the display so looks much nicer.

If you could let me have some sample messages from the app, when
available, I can get the schema added to the database that the HomeSeer
plugin uses.

Looking forward to seeing that app ;-)

James