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simon04 / gnome-shell-extension-weather

An extension for displaying weather notifications in GNOME Shell.
GNU General Public License v3.0
146 stars 277 forks source link

support weather.com api as an alternative to yahoo #120

Open rahulsundaram opened 11 years ago

rahulsundaram commented 11 years ago

for my region, weather.com is far more reliable than Yahoo is. Would you kindly add support for it? Can be a configuration preference.

rahulsundaram commented 11 years ago

apparently weather.com uses the same data as http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/

simon04 commented 11 years ago

This repository is no longer actively maintained. Please take a look at Neroth's fork and file a ticket there: https://github.com/Neroth/gnome-shell-extension-weather

ferdnyc commented 11 years ago

While I realize this repository is the wrong place for development of this feature anyway, I just had to register my surprise regarding the initial request. Not that I'm questioning or disagreeing with it... I guess I'm just confused, as it was my impression that yahoo's data IS the weather.com data. Or that "Yahoo Weather" was just a shell around it, anyway.

I mean, their Hourly and Detail forecast links — actually, pretty much all of the links — on the Yahoo Weather page even take you to the corresponding sections of weather.com. So, I'm surprised to hear that there would be any discrepancy between the two.

I wonder (and this is just me "thinking out loud", now) if the issue might be one of update lag? Right now, the Yahoo Weather page for my region is showing "Last Updated 09:49 EDT"... and it's currently 11:26 AM. So, it could just be that Yahoo is refreshing too infrequently from their own weather.com feed. That's disappointing, if it is indeed the issue.

The barrier, from what I understand, to supporting weather.com (specifically) as a data provider is that they really don't seem to "get" open-source. Not when it comes to their data-consumption policies, anyway. Their data access requirements, at least as developers who've wanted to implement data clients have interpreted them (that I've seen), end up forcing each person who compiles and builds the tool to register for a separate API key, which is a big giant hassle for anyone who just wants to compile a stupid weather tool. Not to mention, the weather extension ISN'T compiled, and I don't believe it's permitted to distribute source containing their API key — which makes me think they don't really "get" interpreted languages, either.

I don't know, maybe things have changed, and they've finally gotten their heads screwed on straight about this stuff. Or, maybe the previous interpretations of their policies were overly pessimistic, and the reality isn't really as tedious & overly-complicated as it was thought to be from the initial investigations. But, like I said, weather.com haven't appeared to be the most welcoming resource, when choosing data providers for a non-commercial, collaboratively-developed open-source project.

ferdnyc commented 11 years ago

Yeah, see... it's actually a frequency issue, I was misremembering slightly.

Reading here:

http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/pricing.html

(which is where weather.com's "WEATHER™ API" link takes you to, for data feed service), a free-as-in-beer API key is restricted to a maximum of 500 requests per day, and a rate of no more than 10 requests per minute... which, for any open-source project, is just unworkable. There's no way any developer can promise to keep data consumption below that level. So to use weather.com/wunderground as the data provider, each USER ends up having to register for and configure their own API key. Big giant hassle.

(Plus, I'm not sure the data would be any better — the weather.org site documents that their own REST feed is updated no more than once per hour. Weather.com's own site typically has up-to-the-minute data, but their data consumers don't necessarily get access to that same freshness... not without shelling out lots of actual cash, anyway.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:41 AM, FeRD ferdnyc@gmail.com wrote:

While I realize this repository is the wrong place for development of this feature anyway, I just had to register my surprise regarding the initial request. Not that I'm questioning or disagreeing with it... I guess I'm just confused, as it was my impression that yahoo's data IS the weather.com data. Or that "Yahoo Weather" was just a shell around it, anyway.

I mean, their Hourly and Detail forecast links — actually, pretty much all of the links — on the Yahoo Weather page even take you to the corresponding sections of weather.com. So, I'm surprised to hear that there would be any discrepancy between the two.

I wonder (and this is just me "thinking out loud", now) if the issue might be one of update lag? Right now, the Yahoo Weather page for my region is showing "Last Updated 09:49 EDT"... and it's currently 11:26 AM. So, it could just be that Yahoo is refreshing too infrequently from their own weather.com feed. That's disappointing, if it is indeed the issue.

The barrier, from what I understand, to supporting weather.com(specifically) as a data provider is that they really don't seem to "get" open-source. Not when it comes to their data-consumption policies, anyway. Their data access requirements, at least as developers who've wanted to implement data clients have interpreted them (that I've seen), end up forcing each person who compiles and builds the tool to register for a separate API key, which is a big giant hassle for anyone who just wants to compile a stupid weather tool. Not to mention, the weather extension ISN'T compiled, and I don't believe it's permitted to distribute source containing their API key — which makes me think they don't really "get" interpreted languages, either.

I don't know, maybe things have changed, and they've finally gotten their heads screwed on straight about this stuff. Or, maybe the previous interpretations of their policies were overly pessimistic, and the reality isn't really as tedious & overly-complicated as it was thought to be from the initial investigations. But, like I said, weather.com haven't appeared to be the most welcoming resource, when choosing data providers for a non-commercial, collaboratively-developed open-source project.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Simon Legner notifications@github.comwrote:

This repository is no longer actively maintained. Please take a look at Neroth's fork and file a ticket there: https://github.com/Neroth/gnome-shell-extension-weather

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/simon04/gnome-shell-extension-weather/issues/120#issuecomment-17067412 .