WeatherAlert

[AGMW]

Another fine release.

The only problem is that the temperature is not (or does not appear to be) centered. Could it be because I have the degree symbol hidden?

Thanks again . . . nothing beats a good freeware program that works better than paid programs!

[darkmark327]

It is deliberately left-aligned. My plan is for the "choose font" button to bring up a whole separate dialog where you first choose the font family, and then choose the size and alignment for each of the three cases: length of 2 (e.g. 5? / 15), length of 3 (e.g. 50? / 100) and length of 4 (e.g. 100? / -12?) as well as one for "N/A" since the sizing for that is different than for numbers. Each of these needs a different size and alignment to appear correctly; I plan to have a preview of each arrayed in a line, and then you can make global adjustments and then below each you can fine tune everything. Unfortunately since the text has to be "drawn" onto an image (which then becomes the tray icon) regular old centering is not really viable (especially with proportional fonts). I have to choose the coordinates of the upper left corner of the drawn text, I don't get to align and such. I'll see if there's some sort of option I can change.

Edited January 3, 2005 by darkmark327

[snippet1]

That would require essentially a complete redesign of the program, particularly with sites that don't have a simple XML-based feed (which is really the only reason I use the weather channel).? I checked and the weather channel (i.e. my program) does have weather data for melbourne, australia. TWC does have stations throughout most of the world.

585222206[/snapback]

Yeah it's great as it is. But occasionally the data's a little delayed for here (on TWC website too). Possible because they likely get it from BOM andThe Weather Company> here anyway.

[trashpickinman]

just found this program.

awesome program, great job writing it.

[darkmark327]

Yeah it's great as it is. But occasionally the data's a little delayed for here (on TWC website too). Possible because they likely get it from BOM and The Weather Company here anyway.

585229054[/snapback]

You have to realize, this is a hobby. It would be an enormous (and honestly, quite dull) undertaking to rewrite the program to take advantage of every country's weather services just so they can get the weather a little faster. If they were in a similar (or at least XML) format I could make it customizable so the user could plug in the URL and fine tune it but it's all completely different.

just found this program.

awesome program, great job writing it.

585229123[/snapback]

Thanks. Right now I'm trying to work out some sort of bug that's causing windows error dialogs to come up. Apparently something's dividing by zero, I wish I knew what and why.

[Spyder Veteran]

OK, I have a test version that everyone can try out, it is 2.2.9.7 which, if all goes well, will become the official 2.3 release.

Get it here!  And let me know of any problems!

Fixed:

- Fixed problem with docking resulting in program "jumping" back and forth for certain resolutions

- Better handling of NWS alerts with two tray icons

- Status messages now work for problems such as no location or no internet connection

- Enabled mute always and based on time range (better displayed on the menus)

- Enabled option for fadeout on exit and window resize animations

- Other slight fixes

Have a happy and healthy new year everyone.

585218478[/snapback]

i love this proggie! thanks (Y)

[burning_jonny]

Wow! Great Work!

Is here any chance at all to select http://weather.ca/ as a source of weather information for those of us in Canada?

[darkmark327]

Thanks. Look two posts above yours.

[burning_jonny]

Thanks.  Look two posts above yours.

585240755[/snapback]

Saw that and was hoping you'd care enough about Canadians to include one of our sites in your grand designs. :p

But I guess it does Canadian weather anyways, so...

[darkmark327]

Saw that and was hoping you'd care enough about Canadians to include one of our sites in your grand designs.?:pp

But I guess it does Canadian weather anyways, so...

585240847[/snapback]

So you thought I'd care about Canada more than Australia?:pp

I care about all users and countries...but come on, youare> getting the weather. Weather.com is plenty slow in the US too; they only let me check every half hour. Their advantage lies with the ability to get that data at all. I haven't seen any other sites that allow access to their backend data.

[JSemple3]

This is kind of cool actually Just discovered this! Neat.

[ev0|]

Really good job. I don't usually run these types of programs because they're usually buggy as hell but this one is quite good. Thanks ! :cool:

[darkmark327]

I'm glad you like it. It does have a few small bugs that I am working on fixing but there are no major issues as far as I know. In addition to the divide by zero mentioned above, I also received an error report from someone from the program crashing on startup. I'll have to trace where that came from. But for now, Counterstrike ; )

[JRosenfeld]

Noticed a minor blemish in v 2.2.9.7

Preferences, settings, sound options: next to the first box there are two half lines of type (top line is Mute all has top half of the letters missing second line Sounds has bottom half of the letters missing missing. Maybe it was meant to be all in one line?

I have XP SP2, screen res 1280x1024, DPI 96 (normal), in case that's relevant.

But I've used this app for some time and like it very much, thanks for making it.

[darkmark327]

Noticed a minor blemish in v 2.2.9.7

Preferences, settings, sound options: next to the first box there are two half lines of type (top line is Mute all has top half of the letters missing second line Sounds has bottom half of the letters missing missing. Maybe it was meant to be all in one line?

I have XP SP2, screen res 1280x1024, DPI 96 (normal), in case that's relevant.

But I've used this app for some time and like it very much, thanks for making it.

585251419[/snapback]

Thanks; someone had pointed that out to me and it is fixed in the latest version. Sometimes the width of a label is sufficient such that it doesn't wrap with visual styles enabled, but with classic style it does wrap. Usually I check such things but this time I forgot.

[JorgeIvan]

Wow this a really cool thingy :D

[darkmark327]

I am glad that everyone finds this a good program. I am still working on it; I discovered FxCop the other day which basically checks your program for bad programming practices. My error handling has resulted in quite a lot of fixing (there were some other little things that I didn't realize I was doing wrong, such as events) so I have a lot of work to do : \ Such is the peril of being self-taught.

Basically the main issue (I've fixed everything else) is with the exception handling. You're only supposed to catch specific exceptions and let unexpected ones propagate until they are caught somewhere (in many places I was just catching everything); unfortunately I can guarantee that I will have missed some types of exceptions by replacing the "catch-all"s with "catch-only-what-you-expect"s. In the end it should result in less problems, but initially I expect a lot of error reports, regardless of how much testing I do. I also intend to overhaul that; with the variety of different email programs I don't always get error reports (my friends who use AOL can't send them) and many are truncated, so what I intend to do is send the exception trace to the webserver (I'll come up with/find some sort of CGI script) with a unique number, and then bring up an email message (with a link to that exception report) where the user can describe the issue if they wish. These two things must be completed before I release this to the public via automatic updates. On a side note, 2.2.9.7 is approaching 100 users (inside "About" it shows this). Help it grow! Tell your family and friends; if you find them using WeatherBug or such, replace it with this ;) But you'd be better off waiting until I get 2.3 done, that will be far better (stability and user-friendly wise) than the current release ;)

[benz240]

Great program! I am glad someone has made a simple weather checking applet independent of those resource hogging desktopX-type stuff (Samurize, Avedesk, etc.....theyre fine but i only need weather!)

However, one question: Why is the button for "Change font" under the Tray Icon Appearance option greyed out? I wanted to change the font a little bigger, but it doesnt look like I can click it.....

edit - read your above post, i'm #99! w00t?

[darkmark327]

Great program!  I am glad someone has made a simple weather checking applet independent of those resource hogging desktopX-type stuff (Samurize, Avedesk, etc.....theyre fine but i only need weather!)

However, one question: Why is the button for "Change font" under the Tray Icon Appearance option greyed out?  I wanted to change the font a little bigger, but it doesnt look like I can click it.....

edit - read your above post, i'm #99! w00t?

585258758[/snapback]

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?show...ost&p=585224198

It's coming

[ScottKin]

Mark,

For being a self-taught programmer/developer, I would have to say that I'm *VERY* Impressed!

I've used dozens of Weather-related programs, and this one has got to be one of the better ones: very easy to use, very no-nonsense. I like the fact that you've also implemented the NWS Weather.com maps *and* animations - a very nice touch.

If this is truely your first attempt, I think we can expect excellent work(s) from you in the future!

--ScottKin

[Netegra]

darkmark327, excellent job on this!

My mom uses Weatherbug religiously but I can't get her to try anything else even though I know Weatherbug includes spyware...

I'll see if I can convince her.

Once again, excellent job!

Proudly, the 113th user!

[KingAndrew876]

im from ontario, and there is a city named the same thing in prince edward island. it only gives the option to choose cornwall, canada, which displayd the cities info in PEI. i wonder if this problem could be fixed.

[ventrox]

wow

this is a great program :D

[darkmark327]

Mark,

For being a self-taught programmer/developer, I would have to say that I'm *VERY* Impressed!

I've used dozens of Weather-related programs, and this one has got to be one of the better ones: very easy to use, very no-nonsense. I like the fact that you've also implemented the NWS Weather.com maps *and* animations - a very nice touch.

If this is truely your first attempt, I think we can expect excellent work(s) from you in the future!

--ScottKin

585259658[/snapback]

Thanks. I have taken some Computer Science classes but so far all I've really gotten out of any of them are data structures (linked lists, etc), and I've learned some Java which helped me adapt to .NET. I used to use books (which I did for HTML, Javascript, and C++ (only console apps) a few years ago) but now it's mainly help (i.e. MSDN) and Google. I believe I elaborated elsewhere in the thread but I first wrote this program (the precursor to it, at least) in VB.NET, since I knew some VBScript, then figured I'd try C# and rewrote the app in that (I believe there's a screenshot of the old app somewhere in the thread). I think this is still built off of that little program, of course now it's enormously more complex (multithreading gets to be a pain, especially when you do it wrong at first...like when you don't realize that you can only access controls (like the radar image) from the creating thread, not just any thread).

im from ontario, and there is a city named the same thing in prince edward island.? it only gives the option to choose cornwall, canada, which displayd the cities info in PEI.? i wonder if this problem could be fixed.

585265260[/snapback]

Unfortunately I can't really do anything about that, when you type in the location and hit OK, it looks up the location on weather.com to get the ID, and then the ID is what is used to download the weather data.

I've almost finished doing another significant overhaul of the program; I've done testing but of course I can't test everything. There may be some previously caught errors that will cause crashes now; make sure to send the error reports if you get any. Right now I'm working on updating that so they don't get truncated (as I described a few posts back). Once that is done I will release the next version (2.2.9.8) for testing (so I guess 2.3 is delayed a bit further).

[Netegra]

Hey Dark,

I got this error when I returned home from lunch today.

I have had the program running for at least 48 hours straight, but did not get this message until today.

It may have been because I left it in Radar mode.

Check out the attachment...