Weather Watcher 5.6 - now better than ever!

[clif_notes]

I just wanted to drop by and help clear up some of the confusion.

-Mike Singer (November 13, 2005, 03:47 PM)

Hi Mike, thanks for that and welcome.

I'm curious: did you just 'accidently' find this discussion or did you use Google (Alerts)?

-brotherS (November 14, 2005, 12:23 AM)

I think Mouser invited him. See #15 in the thread. "and i'm going to also point him to this thread - maybe he wants to make a comment."

Edit: Hmmf, it's hard to beat Mouser to the punch. 

[annorax]

           
There is also Weather Pulse as an alternative.   When I compared Weather Pulse (WP) against the previous version of Weather Watcher (WW),  the two seemed very similar to me.   I chose WP because I preferred some small detail of its presentation.   When I chose WP I don't think I was aware of malware issues with WW.   Does anyone know of malware issues with WP?
       
Pricelessware,  which I think highly of,  lists Weather Watcher but not Weather Pulse (http://www.pricelessware.org/).
     
     

-redmaledeer (November 13, 2005, 03:15 PM)

I was also going to suggest this. I've been using WeatherPulse for over a year and it's superb. It's had some issues in previous versions with memory leaks but they have been removed. Weater Watcher is a great choice as well, but I personally perfer WP. The Docklet is almost like the Konfabulator tool but doesn't look as cool.

[mouser]

weather pulse is also very good.
by the way, a reminder that we actually reviewed weather tools not too long ago: https://www.donation...atherTray/index.html

[brotherS]

I also tested both of them, I prefer Weather Watcher 

[redmaledeer]

There is also Weather Pulse as an alternative.   When I compared Weather Pulse (WP) against the previous version of Weather Watcher (WW),  the two seemed very similar to me.   I chose WP because I preferred some small detail of its presentation.

-redmaledeer (November 13, 2005, 03:15 PM)

     
After I wrote this (Reply No. 19) I found out that Weather Pulse (WP) hung up pretty easily,  both during bootup and normal running,  the latter especially when updating the weather.   I don't know if this is due to WP or to some quirk of my machine.   Does this happen to anyone else?   I still mostly use WP,  but carefully.   Weather Watcher doesn't give me this problem.
   
(Windows XP home,  SP1,  fully updated.)
   

[Carol Haynes]

I gave up on WP when it started to freeze during update. It wasn't a lock up but it froze all processes for a period on boot up and when updating. Maybe my machine but I couldn't live with it and went back to WW.

[redmaledeer]

I gave up on WP when it started to freeze during update. It wasn't a lock up but it froze all processes for a period on boot up and when updating. Maybe my machine but I couldn't live with it and went back to WW.

-Carol Haynes (March 18, 2006, 10:52 AM)

   
That sounds about like my experience -- a bit erratic and quirky.   Reply No. 26 says something related for an earlier version.   Cheers.
   

[Gothi[c]]

To get the most extreme crazy awesome weather info, you guys should play with APRS.

APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) is a technology that takes gps information, along with a whole bunch of other information (weather info, icon, messages,...) and transmits it over an AX.25 protocol (radio amateur version of the X.25 network  protocol) which can be over radio, or the internet. The latter is very interesting, even for non-radio amateurs, as there is a very big network of servers all over the world where radio amateurs and official services broadcast their weather information, amongst other things. This is interesting because first of all, the clients aviable for this protocol are -VERY- advanced. They can download  satelite imagery from the net, live weather radar overlays, weather warning zones can also be an additional layer, they can work with tigermaps or other detailed map data, etc etc,... the posibilities are endless, and most clients allow you to write your own plugins for them. Secondly, you have access to a very massive amount of observations from all around the world. I'm not gonna get into the details as they are a bit complex, but I searched togeather some screenshots from google for you guys.

also check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APRS

best aprs software :

for newbies :  ui-view has a very user friendly interface and is a very powerful program. http://www.ui-view.org/#downloads

if you want it all : xastir is a cross-platform aprs suite that does about everything. http://www.xastir.org/

aprs internet server list : http://www.aprs-is.net/APRSServers.htm



Here are the screenshots:

[brotherS]

That looks very... cryptic! 

[Gothi[c]]

Well, the first screenshot shows storm areas in blue in xastir,
The second one shows temperatures on a map,
third one is aprsdos tracking a hurricane (xastir and ui-view can do this too, but xastir is best at it)
fourth one is a weather stations details in ui-view showing windspeed, direction, etc etc