Giovanni Campagna today released the first version of GNOME Weather (v0.1), a small application similar to Clocks written in Python3. Its current state is very basic, and you can only select a region from a drop-down auto-complete list, and Weather will display the weather of the next 5 days, from yr.no (Norwegian Meteorological Institute).
Gnome Weather might not arrive in Gnome 3.8, but you can still get it and run easily, as it doesn’t need any compile.
GNOME Weather 0.1
Giovanni announced Weather in Desktop-Devel ML
This is just a heads up that I opened a new repository at git.gnome.org for the GNOME Weather app I had previously announced. This is a lot better than it was the last time, and thanks to the just pushed updates to libgweather, it should support weather forecasts for all the world, using the free yr.no service.
Of course there is a lot more to do, but I still hope that gnome-weather can be included as a preview for GNOME 3.8, like we did for clocks in 3.6. Basic functionality is there: you choose your location, and the weather data is fetched from the network. For next steps, besides some obvious ones like the about dialog or preferences for metric vs imperial units, I’d like to hear from designers, if for example it should move to a GNOME 3 content grid and main toolbar, or if the current minimal approach is fine.
Additionally, this is call for help, sort of. libgweather 3.7.3 will include two weather backends in addition to the existing one (which was US only). The first one is Yahoo! Weather, the second one is Yr.no, the Norwegian metereology service. To access these services, we need to extend the location database. In particular, Yahoo! weather uses a proprietary WOEID (Where On Earth Id), which can be queried using its geocoding service (or geocode-glib), but is not included in the database, while yr.no has one entry point using geographical coordinates, and another one using GeoNames. The amount of information varies among them, but in general Yr.no has less data than Yahoo! Weather, so it would be very nice if you could update the location db, adding the woeid for your city or place, and ensuring that the city or place name in the db matches the one in GeoNames (including the region or other administrative subdivision).
Also, it would be very helpful if you could review the contents of the location db for your region, and possibly replace the city name with one that is big and recognizable enough, in place of the town actually hosting the weather station, as currently in the db, as well as cross-checking the coordinates with Google Maps or some other service. Yes, my plan is eventually to integrate geocode-glib in the location entry, so it will be possible to have locations not stored in the
offline db, but I still think it is useful to keep it up-to-date. In particular, if I ever write code fro that, I think I will continue referring to the offline db for weather stations.Enjoy!
How it looks
Well, don’t expect much, as it is just an initial version.
GNOME Weather is a nice chance for new contributors, particularly those interested in GNOME Programming and Python3. There isn’t yet a Bugzilla Account for it (if I am not wrong), but you can still fork it and hack it.
Running it with JHBuild
Giovanni helped me a bit to run it, because at the moment jhbuild generates the right PYTHONPATH only for Python2, so you have to export PYTHONPATH also for Python3. So after you download it and install it, you have to:
jhbuild shell
PYTHONPATH=$JHBUILD_PREFIX/lib64/python3.3/site-packages
..and you are ready to run it!
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