Are there plans to make it easy to label AppJet code as under certain license terms? (Creative Commons, GPL, LGPL, BSD, Microsoft's 'Shared Source' silliness...)
Feature request: let me give you my email address and my zip code so you can send me an email in case it's likely to rain in my area that day. I check my email every morning over breakfast so it could work out nicely.
If you want to put some advertisements (that aren't obnoxious) along with the data, I really don't care. I am a moderately affluent college-aged male who enjoys buying electronics, games, and other goods online on a frequent basis.
Simpleweather did one odd thing: when I typed my city in the search box, it showed one result. Since it didn't have a line beath it I didn't even realize it was a hyperlink.
If there's one result, take them to it.
One good thing tho: it knew that that Celsius is used everywhere outside the US.
I've always been a fan of wunderground (http://wund.com). In addition to the main site, it has similar functionality to what's described in the article with its mobile/iphone subsites.
A little project I did over the holidays. I got sick of how slow and cluttered weather.com was, so I whipped up this little service. I hope other people can find it useful.
It took me about a day. It is written in Rails. It contains about 100 lines of application code.
Feature requests: ip to location or save zip in a cookie that's easy to change. The most annoying part of weather.com for me, aside from the clutter, is typing in a zip. Having the forecast oriented horizontally like a calendar would be nice. ical integration would be pretty slick.
I've always thought it would be cool for there to be a site that just looks at your IP and gives you the local weather and time and links to other relevant info.
Wouldn't work for people behind a corporate firewall. My old employer used to route all of its traffic through the head office in the US even though we were in Canada.
I've been using the forecasts on http://weather.gov lately. In fact, using the search field on the left, I entered my zipcode and got taken to a nice forecast page with an obnoxiously long URL that I then bookmarked in Safari and set up as a hotkey in QuickSilver. Now I type Cmd-Space at any time to be taken to a perfect forecast summary with a disgustingly rich set of maps, radar, and satellite images, discussion of the forecast by the forecaster, etc., all a click or two away.
My setup curve was a bit long, but now that it's set up it's unbelievably easy to check the weather. So if you could rig up an app that even approximates that without all the manual setup work that I had to put into it, then I'm sure you'd find hordes of users.
I usually don't plug anything here but this is directly related to my latest weather startup: http://www.OtherWeather.com
Better interface and layout than weather.com (less ads), social influence (each forecast is rated and users ranked), Google map mashup, user profile pages and weather widgets/forecast RSS feed.
I just launched, and haven't had the time to promote but check us out.
It is possible! Negative temperatures are perfectly well-defined (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature). In fact, they are higher than positive temperatures. There is a discontinuity in the traditional temperature system at 0, and the highest possible temperature is 0-, i.e., zero approached from the left. The lowest temperature (the traditional "absolute zero") is 0+.
Perhaps a more sensible system is one that uses \beta = -1/kT to measure temperature, where k is Boltzmann's constant. This temperature scale runs from -infinity to +infinity, with no discontinuities.
Weird. It comes straight from the National Weather Service, so it must be something strange with their data. Some sanity checking would be advisable, though.
You're right that weather.com really sucks, but it's much better at finding locations. On forecaster, zip codes seem to work, but trying to type in Monterey, CA results in Monterey, Louisiana. Monterey CA results in Monterey Indiana. If you have multiple results, how about giving me a list?
I love it. The app is designed like a perfect iphone app, but when rendered on the iphone, the huge orange text caused it to render everything small. Other than that, it's perfect; easy to use, immediate information that I want!
Are those valid zip codes? Neither 77915 or 12345 are in my database of zip codes.
I have a table that has the lat/long of zip codes so that I can find the closest observation station.
Edit: If I can't find the zip, I'll default to that state's center. So even invalid zip codes like 12345 will "work"- in this case, it'll go to around Schenectady.
Having worked there, I can confirm that 12345 is a valid zip code -- it's technically the zip code for the GE plant in Schenectady. It was at one point, large enough to warrant its own zip code...
I think there's enough of a need for 'just the forecast' to build this app.
Feature creep is exactly why weather.com sucks (well, that and ads).
That being said -- a replacement feature that's more in line with simplicity and 'just the data' would be an hour by hour forecast. That's what most people use the radar for anyway. Well, except when there's a severe storm. For that, you could add . . . . [hours later] . . . and then you just have to secure the rights to www.weather.com!
http://weather.appjet.net/
You can check out the source at http://source.weather.appjet.net/. It's about 75 lines of code. Feel free to clone/modify it.