Plasma widgets weather applets

[woodsmoke]

Well, this is not new to KDE or plasma applets, or whatever.

It goes back for years and also was a situation with the weather applets of various docking bars, although one has to say that Cairo dock finally got a weather applet that worked and just used the zip code for location, for the u.s. that is, don't know about other countries.

But, the weather applets for KDE have never worked for me, except "sporadically", sometimes they would work and sometimes not.

Of the three present widgets, two are written by the same fellow, and both use "wetter.com" from Germany, and both will "work" one types in the name of the city or the name of an airport, and the menu system provides a "place", if one uses the name of a city, one gets the weather from "wetter" and if one uses an airport, for some reason, one gets a British weather service.

BUT.....they BOTH... then...."time out" :0

The other one is the old "Pyweather" and it just doesn't work at all.

So.... it would seem to me that after all this time and effort, someone could go to the two people that produce the above and ask if one could rewirte the code to use the National Weather Service, ...

one would THINK that it would possibly just be a few, or maybe one, line of code, "fetch from....".

For some reason the weather addon for Firefox works...

What about other folks, do you regularly use the plasma weather widgets?

If so...results?

just comments and questions. no biggie.

woodsmoke

[Rog132]

Weather

Looking KDE weather apps:








From the official Ubuntu (Saucy - alpha) repositories:

Part of the KDE

plasma-widgets-workspace

Description: plasma widgets and containments for the KDE Plasma Workspace
This package contains standard Plasma widgets and containments shipped in the
KDE base workspace module. They provide such basic desktop functionality as
the panel, task manager, application laucher, clock and more. The default KDE
Workspace is a combination of these visual components.
.
This package also includes the default animator used by the main KDE Plasma
Desktop shell.
.
This package is part of the KDE base workspace module.

Homepage: http://www.kde.org/

plasma-widgets-addons


Description: additional widgets for Plasma
This package contains additional Plasma widgets shipped in the Plasma
addons module. Install it if you want a variety of widgets on your Plasma
desktop.
.
This package provides the following widgets:
* Binary Clock
* Black Board
* Bookmarks
* Bouncy Ball
* Bubblemon
* Calculator
* Character Selector
* Color Picker
* Comic Strip
* Dictionary
* Eyes
* Fifteen Puzzle
* File Watcher
* Fuzzy Clock
* Icon Tasks
* Incoming Message
* Knowledge Base
* Konqueror Profiles
* Konsole Profile
* LCD Weather Station
* Leave a Note
* Life
* Luna
* Magnifique
* Media Player
* Microblogging
* News
* Notes
* Now Playing
* OpenDesktop.org Community
* OpenDesktop.org Social News
* Paste
* Pastebin
* Picture Frame
* Plasmaboard
* Previewer
* Qalculate!
* Remember The Milk
* RSSNOW
* Show Widget Dashboard
* Show Desktop
* Spell Check
* System Load Viewer
* Timer
* Unit Converter
* Weather Forecast
* Web Slice
.
This package is part of the KDE Plasma addons module.

Homepage: http://plasma.kde.org/

[Rog132]

Weather 2

From the KDE-Apps/Look


plasma-widget-weatherforecast

Description: weather Plasma widget that shows the forecast and temperature
This Plasma widget shows the temperature and weather forecast for the next two
days.

Homepage: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...?content=92149

plasma-widget-yawp

Description: Yet Another Weather Plasmoid fetches weather forecasts for you
yaWP is a nice and simple plasmoid for KDE 4.x to show the weather forecast,
works with different weather sources, you can configure it to show several
days in advance, to display the current satellite image and it is also
possible to keep track of multiple cities.
.
This package contains the Plasmoid itself and the basic theme for yaWP.
.
yaWP can be considered to be the native KDE 4.x replacement for the
SuperKaramba script "LiquidWeather++".

Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/yawp

plasma-widget-cwp

Description: Customizable Weather Plasmoid (CWP)
This is another weather plasmoid.
.
It aims to be highly customizable, but a little harder to setup than other
weather plasmoids. Nearly any weather forecast provider can be used,
as long as the data is provided as html files (no flash).
.
The information how to extract the information from these html files is
stored inside xml files. Commands like grep, head, tail, sed, awk, ... will
do this job.

Homepage: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...?content=98925

plasma-wallpapers-addons

Description: additional wallpaper plugins for Plasma
This package contains additional Plasma wallpaper plugins that are used in
the Plasma desktop to give marble, mandelbrot and other such wallpapers.
.
This package contains the following wallpaper plugins:
* Globe (Marble)
* Mandelbrot
* Pattern
* Picture of the day
* Virus
* Weather
.
This package is part of the KDE Plasma addons module.

Homepage: http://plasma.kde.org/

(Not in the repositories)

plasma-widget-weather-smhi

Description: a weather plasmoid showing 5-days forecast
Plasmoid shows 5-days forecast with data from the SMHI, the Swedish Meteorological
and Hydrological Institute.
.
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show...?content=93235

[Rog132]

Apps and why they are not working....

Some of the widgets have easy to use pull down menus (Continent -> Country -> City -> ...) - some have cryptic code and you need to search it from the net.

The widgets are parsing the data from the internet. If the data provider is changing the data format then the app can't work properly.

Quote from the cwp - http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php...?content=98925

It aims to be highly customizable, but a little harder to setup than other weather plasmoids.
Nearly any weather forecast provider can be used, as long as the data is provided as html files (no flash).
The information how to extract the information from these html files is stored inside xml files.
Commands like grep, head, tail, sed, awk, ... will do this job.

Sometimes the repository version is simply tool old.


More options...

Conky weather scripts using Accuweather/WUnderground/NWS/Weather.com: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=19235


----------------------------------------------------------------

More about clocks: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...p?61798-Clocks
More about KDE application launchers: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...tion-Launchers

[woodsmoke]

Thanks for the great posts!

For people who have not used them, there is now, on display, a wonderful cornucopia of images!

However, I do note one thing:

The images all show "Helsinki" ( with the exception of Brasilia).

Is it possible that therein lies the problem?

The default is "european"....

Not that that is a bad thing, in and of itself, but possibly it the interaction with "U.S." stuff that is the problem.

In researching this, I notice that the U.S. weather service is trying out new "don't know....ways of presenting the information"...and it may be that the actual coding of the U.S. stuff maybe does not have, or has more of, or something of maybe...don't know.... error trapping, or cycle times for the flow of information, I notice that the default minimum time for the two provided Plasma widgets is to update is 30 minutes.

Possibly, that default time, in and of itself, interactw with the U.S. information to cause the "time out"..

But....hey..............YOU WENT TO A GREAT LENGTH....a LOT of WORK, to provide those images and etc.

Thanks!

I will look into the KDE repos, all that I did was do the default widgets and "look for new widgets".

woodsmoke

[Rog132]

The KDE LCD weather station and the KDE weather forecast plasmoids have the 'timed out' problem. They both are using the same backend/dataengine. Earlier: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...imed-out-error .

Now and then the plasmoids are showing the correct information but still showing the data retrieval animation until there is a 'timed out' error.

[woodsmoke]

yeppers

although I am presently evaluating the CWP which you suggested and shall report therupon in a timely manner.

woodsmoke

[whatthefunk]

I use yawp and love it. Accuweather is the best provider in my opinion.

[dmeyer]

yeppers

although I am presently evaluating the CWP which you suggested and shall report therupon in a timely manner.

woodsmoke

I highly recommend trying out YAWP. CWP is amazing but YAWP is just so pretty and feature rich that you won't need more. Also YAWP is easy to change because it's written in QML so you can change how it looks if you so desire.

[woodsmoke]

I'll check it out!

woodbusycheckingthingsoutsmoke

[woodsmoke]

Wellll

after several days of running the customizeable weather applet it does indeed work, here in the midwest U.S.

And yes it is very customizable.

I would GENTLY suggest that the people who prepare Kubuntu remove one of the presently provided widgets, and add the CWP.

In that way, the Europeans, for whom the first mentioned applets work will have one, and the U.S. has one that works.

As to YAWP, I have not tried it.

woodsmoke

[woodsmoke]

YAWP worked out of the box with Saucy.

I needed to put in the zip code of a nearby airport.

The app recognized the name of my town but would not supply weather for it.

I used Accuweather.

woodsmoke

[woodsmoke]

YAWP continues to function nicely.

It pops when the computer is restarted with no input.

woodsmoke

[OldSmoky2]

For what it's worth, I can add that I am in the U.S. and have used YAWP for quite some time and have been very happy with it.

[footer]

Thank you so much for this thread. I've been using Simple Weather Forecast for many years, and Liquid Weather before that. Just upgraded to 13.10 and Simple Weather Forecast had to go. Not only because it's too basic, but the next couple of days were being displayed (ie. Thu Wed) just like in your screenshots! I call that BROKE!

Anyway, switched to yaWP and it's awesome!

Thanks.