Hey Skwire,

I've been using your program for many years, and love it.  However about a year ago for some reason it stopped receiving any updates, no matter what new machine I install it on (latest version, everything says "N/A").  I cannot even search for my particular location (city name, zip, etc.).  This is not an issue with the Yahoo API that occurred back then, since I just reinstalled your program on my new Win 10 installation just now, and I'm still not getting any weather data.  I added the sweather.exe to be allowed for both incoming and outgoing connections in the Windows Firewall but that has not fixed anything.  I suspect maybe my router is blocking the port?!?  What port is it using, I may try to troubleshoot that next.  Also has anyone else experienced the same thing, and if so what was the fix?  Thanks!

Thanks for the quick reply, no I haven't tried https://. ; I just noticed that in fact.  However I'm running into a slightly different problem now, the settings aren't being saved for some reason.  Tried restarting the program and same thing.  I hit "Save" on the bottom right and theres a ~4 second pause, then the window goes away.  I open up options again and none of my settings were saved.  This wasn't doing it the first time I opened up this program...  Where are the settings for sWeather stored anyway?

EDIT: I tried "reset tray icon positions" and got an error:


and indeed there is no file ".ico" in the path.

EDIT 2: OK I figured it out!  I've identified the issues.  First I had the sWeather directory in C:\Program Files (x86) which is privileged, and I think my security settings are still set such that sWeather cannot create the 2 additional files (config.ini and locations.lst) it needs.  Once I moved it to another directory it ran fine.  Enabling SSL/https I think fixed the issue of not receiving any weather updates.  Thanks for your help!

This is portable software, and thus shouldn't be installed in Program Files or other protected directories.

What ATH said.

As a general rule, if you ever download a "portable" app -- one that does not have a setup installer but just relies on you to put it somewhere yourself, you need to put it in some directory of your own creation not inside any of the "system" folders like Users\ or "C:\Program Files".

Many of us have created a directory like "C:\PortableApps" or "C:\Programs" for putting portable files in.

sWeather is unable to establish a connection to the weather server. N/A showing everywhere. Have tried with and without https mode. Has been working fine for a couple of years now.
Was there another change to the Yahoo API?
v1.7.5 build 1 in use.

Cheers
Dhry

sWeather is unable to establish a connection to the weather server. N/A showing everywhere. Have tried with and without https mode. Has been working fine for a couple of years now.
Was there another change to the Yahoo API?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather has no weather data so it may not be an API issue.

Hello, dhry and march12234, and welcome to the DonationCoder site. 

From what I can tell, the Yahoo! Weather API was down for a bit, but appears to be working for me at this time.  If this happens again, go here and click the test button: https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/
If the query comes back with "null," you know the problem is not with sWeather. 

Hi skwire,

It's been a while since I visited this forum. I see that sWeather is still going strong. 

Haven't updated sWeather in a while, so I only now noticed relatively recent options change that made temperature icon going before conditions icon in system tray.
And now my tray doesn't look as it used to be. Since sWeather is the last thing I load in tray, temperature icon is last icon in it, so it's easily noticeable. Obviously, I have conditions icon here to, but now it is the last, because it's after temperature icon.

Is there an easy way, to implement some kind of icon order change through an option or hidden ini file setting, for the sake of variety?

Thanks,
lotra

I'm still on XP, but I can do that too with a help of a program Taskbar Shuffle. But, I was thinking not to have to do that every day. 
Anyway, never mind, it's not such a big deal.

Hi, kenor4, and welcome to the DonationCoder site.

It is posiblle add more precis conversion for metric units? e.g.: one decimal place or optionally?  Thx!

Do you mean for the temperatures?  If so, no, because I just display what the weather data feed gives me, i.e, I'm not rounding up or down.

Hey, Jody. Long time no see. 

Didn't know or care about weather 'gadgets' until recently - must've gotten old. 
Found yours by reading the newsletter and got a few considerations after first run. Otherwise it's doing its job, looks nice and I'm grateful for it. 

Observations under XP-SP3 (with SP4 unofficial pack) using sWeather v1.7.5.1:
- when changing date/time format and enabling it, titlebar shows first day of month (01) and a time of 00:00 instead of current day and time.
- editing location name in the WOEIDs list does not instantly propagate to the main window even after enabling the checkbox below ("Display locations using names configured above…), as all other settings do; it only does after clicking "Save".
- barometer cannot be configured to show mm Hg (depends on Yahoo-provided data, maybe?)
- Neither the 'Full forecast' and 'Radar' nor the 'Powered by Yahoo' links do not show the actual URLs in statusbar when hovered, for consistency with the other fields that show converted data, and for paranoids/control freaks (like me). 
- 'Last provider update' notification in statusbar shows local timezone time but it doesn't get updated in all situations (may be connection errors or something else - are these mentioned anywhere in statusbar? Or maybe it doesn't take winter time into account (where applicable). I had it show last update at 9:00 AM although it was well past 10 AM, and now it says last update at 1:00 PM and it's 2:30 PM). Also, time format should be synchronized with user settings for 12/24h so that 'Last update' time would also display in 12/24h format as selected by user for sunrise/sunset.
- neither main menu nor the tray menu are updated for the current session when a location was deleted from the WOEIDs list.
- since certain changes in settings require an application restart, such restart/reload option would be useful in main menu and in the tray menu.
- it takes a few seconds to close the settings window even when nothing was changed.
- main window's tray tooltip shows a blank line at the bottom - is that intentional or a bug?
- there is a 'close to tray' option but there is no 'minimize to tray', which I'd very much like, to unclutter the taskbar but keep the original function of the {x} button.
- my taskbar is at the top and somehow all regular tooltips in systray are positioned snapped to the top of the screen, which makes certain data hardly readable; could the tooltips be replaced with "fake" ones, maybe balloons or captionless GUIs?
- so many individual icons produce HDD fragmentation; best would be to convert each icon set to bitmap strip, embed these strips in the executable and load them as imagelists at runtime. Additional user-provided icon sets could be allowed, also in the form of image strip bitmaps.

That's about it, gotta go. Good luck ahead! 

Glad to see you in shape and thank you for replying.

The date/time won't budge from Thu 01 January, 00:00 (shown in RO regional style), and if I set the format to LongDate it shows January 01, 1970. Which means it doesn't compute A_Now. Could be a problem with XP vs Win7 but I doubt it. The format I use is dddd dd MMMM, HH:mm, nothing fancy (see screenshot below).

EDIT: Date/time mystery is partly solved: my IE8 can't access the timezonedb API URL for some reason (tested by feeding the URL directly to IE's address bar), so URL_Get() returns a blank value, then unix2Human() returns an unaltered returnDate. No idea why my IE can't access that URL, maybe I tampered too much with its settings some time ago or maybe they just block IE versions lower than… dunno… 9? QtWeb does return the correct data from that URL so there's no firewall or anything blocking that particular URL.
/EDIT

each edit would take an extra refresh of the weather data

Not all edited fields would require a data refresh. City/town name, for example, shouldn't, it's just for display since the data is retrieved by WOEID if I'm not mistaken. Actually I think data refresh should be triggered only by the addition of a new City/WOEID and only for that one. Dunno how the script works, maybe you're not keeping the full data between timed refreshes and that's why it requires a refresh on each change in settings, and even when nothing was changed (clicking on {x} to close the settings window, not on 'Save').
And yes, I have a very slow connection (15kB/s most of the time, a metered 3G modem connection) so it does take some time on each refresh.

The Yahoo data doesn't provide it in that format.  I could probably do the math and add it as an option.

Air pressure format is not that important to me, if there's more request for that or it's easy to implement then yes, you may do that, otherwise make it a low priority.

Good idea, and one I should be able to easily implement.

In regard to showing links there's one more reason for me: the default browser (Pale Moon) starts up very slowly (more than a minute) due to many extensions and takes CPU to 100%, so for quick browsing I use another one (QtWeb) which is snappy. But clicking a link would fire up the default browser so I'd rather see the URL and type it down manually in QtWeb.
For the same reason I'd like a tooltip and/or statusbar URL shown for the info (i) button next to date/time, which I didn't know was going to fire up the default browser, and for the two statusbar icons as well (which opened two separate Pale Moon windows !!!, not two tabs in one window as I set it).
An idea would be to add a separate ActiveX control window acting like a mini-browser for all the links and let the user select whether to use that or the system default browser. I know, it'd complicate the script a little but it may prove useful in the long run. Your choice - it's just an idea.

This data comes directly from the feed.  I don't modify it at all.

OK, then I'll take it as is. Anyway, they say starting next year we won't be using winter time anymore so it won't be a problem for me. Not that it is a big one now anyway.

If I delete a location from the list and click save, the menu is updated for me.

I noticed the issue at first run after adding my location and then deleting the default location. Both were still shown in main menu and tray menu until I restarted the application. Now when adding and then deleting a location it does update both menus in real time. It may have to do only with the default location. Try running the script/app fresh without config file, add a random location then delete the default one, see if you can reproduce.

Here's the tooltip sporting the blank line; maybe there's data missing…?


And here's an idea of how a 'fake' tooltip could look like, it's from ForecastFox (an old-style extension for Firefox/Pale Moon):

I know you're not going to like this, but this isn't going to change.

You're right. That was the most important issue, that's why I left it last. I have less than 300MB free on the system partition and those icons would take way too much space - I had to place the app on another partition but I'd rather have all portable apps in one single location which is on the system partition.
May I please know the reason why you wouldn't consider using image strips? Copyright issues or something? Otherwise I could help with the code if you wanted, I've done that in some of my scripts.

Thank you for considering all other suggestions. Hopefully it won't be too much work. If you need any more info/testing/whatever you may contact me by e-mail (same nickname as here at mail.com); I don't have the Yahoo account anymore, can't use either Miranda IM or their own messaging app in XP so I deleted all my Yahoo accounts (and the GMail one).

  N/A everywhere

https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/

Important EOL Notice: As of Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019, the weather.yahooapis.com and query.yahooapis.com for Yahoo Weather API will be retired.
To continue using our free Yahoo Weather APIs, use https://weather-ydn-yql.media.yahoo.com/forecastrss. Contact yahoo-weather-ydn-api@oath.com for credentials to onboard to this free Yahoo Weather API service.

Should I start looking for a replacement for sWeather ?

RP

Thanks Jody, looking forward to the new version.

Dhry