Notices

I remember taking a look at weather apps before; the problem I always ran up against was that the data itself was never free. I _could_ find sites that would let you freely use data for yourself, but always required some sort of paid license to either (a) redistribute the data or (b) create an app that would allow others to access the original site. The concept of a generic weather app, accessing data from multiple sites, just didn't seem feasible...

Maybe I'm missing something?

Ok, Just trying to gather as much data as possible, on both data-formats and access to the API...

http://api.wunderground.com/weather/api/
Cost: free, pay more if you use API too often
Format: JSON or XML

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/n...er-service-nws
Format: XML, SOAP, DWML
Cost: free?

http://openweathermap.org/API
Format: JSON, XML, HTML
Cost: free, limitation of capacity

http://www.worldweatheronline.com/api/docs/
Format: JSON, XML, ....
Cost: free

http://blog.forecast.io/the-forecast-data-api/
Format: JSON
Cost: free 1000calls/day, additional calls $1 per 10000 calls

Additional information, and-or correction, is welcome.

Thank you. Best wishes.

Yeah, they've all got limits that pretty much stop any free api from being usable in a general app:

Free: max 500 requests per day, 10 per minute.

NOAA is interesting; they _do_ attempt to provide their data for free, but seem to have capacity issues. Ultimately, they suggest no more than 720 queries per hour in their documentation, and warn that their API will have issues with high-volume use... Still, might be an option.

These guys are better than most; 3000 requests per minute, and a total of 4 million per day, before you have to pay for a higher level of service. Might even be usable for the number of Maemo users remaining...

Their free API maxes out at 4000 requests / day. Paid for more.

Which actually brings me to a question: are there any options left for commercial, paid apps on Maemo? None of these weather providers offer direct-to-user payment plans; their APIs all assume they will be getting paid by the app (or web) developer, and that person will be finding some way to generate revenue.

Actually, I've been mulling this over for another app I've been working on, so let me open a new thread for it.

Copernicus, maybe taking over maintainership of the abandoned omweather would be a good solution? From all the programs, it still works, and would require only few minor bugfixes to be "perfect"... (Famous Last Words [TM]).

/Estel

Ok, I've just downloaded the omweather source code, and taken a quick look. It appears that they were retrieving all their data from The Weather Channel (weather.com). However, it looks as though the weather.com service has been retired. So, in order to work again, omweather would need to derive its data from some other source...

EDIT: Aha, I see that omweather can access other providers; I'm seeing database for a Russian and a Norwegian service in the application manager. Still, not sure how those would work.

EDIT 2: Ok, I'm running OMWeather now, and oddly enough, it is pulling data down from weather.com just fine...

I'm using OMWeather daily with weather.com on my N900, and it is still working fine for me. A really nice app, IMO. Has some usability/features that I kind of miss in Meecast. Never having looked at the code, I always assumed that it screenscrapes weather.com, which is why (again, I assume) it's such a large package.

I've always used (when needed) OMWeather without any major issues. UI is sometimes a little awkward with regards to clicking to switch between current, AM/PM forecast, hourly forecast.

Meecast was a successor IIRC so it may have a few ideas for anyone willing to take up the task of maintaining/updating/creating new app.

It's too bad they don't, and you have to be the middleman in that transaction. (I suppose if you had millions of customers like certain "Brand X" phones, you could turn a tidy profit by marking up the cost just a tiny bit for the user, but Maemo market is much smaller by orders of magnitude untold. )

Ok, checking out Meecast a little bit, it seems they are using a couple of different sources: openweathermap.org (which may be usable for a community as small as Maemo now is), foreca.com (which doesn't seem to have an official free feed), and yr.no (a Russian-area site also used by OMWeather).

I think an app based mostly on openweathermap.org is probably the most feasible choice for an open source app going forward; but still, once that limit is hit, service for all users will be disrupted until it gets restored...

I'm using omweather daily, and the weather.com data is working for me, too. f XML feeds have been retired, i'm not sure if it's doing it LEGALLY, though, but shhhhh

Anyway, indeed, it (should) be build to support providers via "modules". BTW, if you're looking at source code (and will be able to determine where it gets its weather.com data...), it suffer from two odd bugs. First, between 0 and 6 AM (local time of user), the days in long-term forecast are shifted +1 from reality. So, if it is 3AM saturday, forecast for next day will be shown as "Monday".

Second, the length of day is bugged - it shows same sunset and sunrise for whole week. Then, at some unknown point, it updates (to, again, show the same, changed values, for whole week). Maybe it have something to do with weather.com changes, dunno.

/Estel