What is so difficult about a weather app?

[coldraven]

I cannot believe that a simple thing like a weather app is hard to find.
The app in the Software Centre is broken even though Launchpad says that it's fixed. When trying to add a location you get to "Apply" then it hangs and generates "Ubuntu had an internal error".

indicator-weather 11.11.28-0ubuntu1.3
I'm running a fully updated Ubuntu 12.04

$ uname -a
Linux snappy 3.8.0-32-generic #47~precise1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 2 16:19:35 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I have reported this at Launchpad but I still cannot find a solution.

On AskUbuntu there are various answers but none of these "weather" apps show me want I want to know.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/14970...op-weather-app
I want to know the wind speed and direction for the day. Where I live the weather is determined by the speed and direction of the wind and it changes quite often.
The technical term for it is "hyper-oceanic". For the current wind direction I can look out of the window, I want to know what it's going to do later.

Maybe I should learn how to setup Conky
Any ideas? </moderate_rant_level>

[Docaltmed]

my-weather-indicator is pretty comprehensive.

sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

[monkeybrain20122]

my-weather-indicator is pretty comprehensive.

sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

You need to add the ppa first. It is not in the repository as far as I remember.

[Docaltmed]

ah, you are correct, monkeybrain. It's been a while and I forgot. It's the atareao repository.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

[RichardET]

ah, you are correct, monkeybrain. It's been a while and I forgot. It's the atareao repository.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

I added this - its pretty good.

[b|ackhole]

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

So I installed this to check it out and I like how it stays neat up in the top and shows the temprature and a small icon representing the weather. However I had earlier gotten a a wiget that sits on my desktop for weather that I liked. It's actually the only thing I use out of Screenlets (https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/screenlets/) because I could not for the life of me get Conkey to run smoothly no matter how I tried.

[b|ackhole]

I figured out how to edit images, so this is what it looks like on my desktop with Screenelts' weather app:



Note, I just have the widget's transparency down a bit so it's subtle, and expanded to a full forecast.

[buzzingrobot]

Weather apps aren't especially difficult. I assume their apparent dearth is due to lack of interest. It's isn't unusual in FOSS for small single-purpose apps to be written more or less as learning experiences and then abandoned.

Every one I've seen works the same way: Ask the user to identify a location, grab the current forecast/conditions from an online source, parse the text that's returned, and display it in a pop up adorned with cute weather images.

A large number of shell script incarnations of these are scattered across the web that can be executed in a terminal. Not as pretty, but probably more informative.

I just point my browser at a good weather site. Here in the U.S. it's one of the NOAA sites, in the UK it's the Met Office, and so on.

[Yellow Pasque]

One of the tough things is that free weather providers (like weather.com) will shut down their services, so there are some good weather applets/scripts out there that are currently broken until they're updated to a new provider. I had a tough time finding a good weather app in KDE, but at least the xfce weather app works nicely.

[ian-weisser]

[...]free weather providers (like weather.com) will shut down their services, so there are some good weather applets/scripts out there that are currently broken[...]

Exactly. And most free providers (when available) offer different types of data. Also, data type and quality varies from continent to continent.

So a developer has two choices: Either create a quite complex three-layer application (provider plug-in, abstraction, display), or create a very simple two-layer application (single-provider, display). No big surprise that after looking at the issues, most developers decided upon the latter.