I have no idea.
Exactly. :thumbright: So it could be only once a year that you have to change a city list.
or it could be done accumulatively…ups, sorry for my English, I mean if the changes are very often, they can be done all together once in a halfyear or in a year. I dont think that the big cities gonna be added, cause they already should be supported by weather.com. So I suggest it will be some small cities, where the update can come later…
Come on mike, do it :iconbiggrin: :roll:
No, Mike just concentrate on improving Weather Watcher!
I agree. Mike supplies a program that retrieves data from Weather Channel. I don’t feel it’s his responsibility to list every city with a weather tower – thats ours. If you live near a tower you want to use - change it, Mike already gives us the ability to add the details to WW.
thats ours. If you live near a tower you want to use - change it, Mike already gives us the ability to add the details to WW.
can you explain what do you mean???
What means to add details?
I think adding list of the cities is improving…
I must agree, the program and its functionality should be the main focus. But improvements doesn’t always come in bunches, and not all improvements are the same type, so it might not look like improvements to everyone. And maybe this could be done between the updates that you consider improvements…
Yes, Mike supplies a program that retrieves data from TWC, but i don’t think that’s the one being discussed here, since it’s only Mikes other and more well-known program that even look at these data. Unless you yourself look at the raw output from dl.exe…?
The main program, which is ofcourse Weather Watcher, only has the scope of requesting and recieving data and formatting them for people to understand. As the ability to search for cities, instead of having to type the correct and full name, would greatly improve the process of finding the city you desire, this would also be a valuable addition to the program.
I didn’t realize it was our responsibility to list all the cities, nor is it Mikes, since all the data should be published and generated by TWC. Thus TWC and TWC alone should list the cities that has [registered] weather towers.
This i just didn’t understand - can we really add additional data sources? I must’ve really missed something in an update. How do I do this?
I must agree though, that keeping a static list would be far to big a burden, for anyone having to maintain it, and retrieving all the cities every 15 minutes would be extreme overkill. In my oppinion, the way to go might be a combination, though saving lists of cities for a longer time doesn’t make to much sense to me. My thought is something like this:
[list][]First time you open WW after install, it retrieves a list of coutries, and save it.
[]Then you might go to search for a city, and the list of countries populate a dropdown
[]When you choose a [new] country for the first time, WW adds the country to a ‘most recently used countries’-list
[]WW then retrieves a list of cities in the chosen country, in which you can search from WW, as mentioned/suggested
[*]From then on, every time WW is started, it retrieves a list of cities, for each of the ‘most recently used countries’
There might be a setting for specifying how many days there should between updating the list[/list]Then, most of the time, there would be a approx. up-to-date list, to search for your desired city, without having to download to much data too often and keeping lists you wont need, and without having to maintain the list manually. I’m not fully aware of how to get lists of countries, but for cities, this might be usefull: http://uk.weather.com/search/drilldown/?.. - it lists all cities in a given country by first letter, which is specified through an URL parameter, and then it should be fairly easy to extract the name and code of the cities.
Otherwise, the direct city codes could be polled and the list could be brute-forced in that way, ie. retrieving http://uk.weather.com/weather/local/GMXX0001[/url] to [url=http://uk.weather.com/weather/local/GMXXNNNN]http://uk.weather.com/weather/local/GMXXNNNN until NNNN is the first number that fails to retrieve, which in this example would be 0273.
Well, these are just a few simple thoughts i just got, and a little hot air I had to let out - and I’m sorry if i offended anyone, but hope I could help a little.
I know the processes and ideas I specified above, could be optimized, refined and clarified, but it’s getting late, so I might look in to it after sleeping a little…
I simply meant that you could easily search TWC to find the city code for the location nearest you and add that information into WW.
The cities weather.com covers/maintains is not that dynamic. New cities aren’t being formed that frequently, new countries aren’t being created and weather.com isn’t expanding that frequently. Thus updating the name list more frequently than once a year is totally/completely unnecessary.
Currently if I select Add City and key in “New York” I see a list of 4 cities that meet that criteria. Where does this data come from? If I key in “New Yourk” I get no hits. If I key in “New” I get no hits. It would be nice if weather.com could produce a list of close match cities when we mess up a spelling or supply very high level portions or a city’s name. Maybe it does and the limitation’s WW’s. Maybe it doesn’t and WW could add the functionality. Which option applies I don’t know.
If however the latter is a possibility I would like to see it where an end user enters a 1st letter plus an “*” followed by a country and WW then searches an external list, if it exists. Thus the coding changes to WW is minimal.
The list can be created programmatically. Read the weather.com pages for Brazil, France, Germany, Latin America, United Kingdom and etc. Such as
etc
Or start here:
or here:
[size=2]Charing Cross, England Weather Forecast and Conditions - The Weather Channel | Weather.com
World (UK) [size=2] (Forum sw not taking kindly to URLs with * in them. Sorry, you will have to cut & paste it in.)[/size]
or here:
[size=2]Nationaler und lokaler Wetterradar, tägliche Vorhersage, Orkane und Informationen von The Weather Channel und weather.com
World (DE)
Drill down until you get the cities list; extract name, URL and country, go to next one. When done sort by name within country.
The various pages can be read using [b]wget[/b] and the extracts can be FOR or WHILE loops depending on language used. It might even be possible using a CMD script. But the list can definitely be done programmatically. And once a year or whenever a end user notes a missing site should be fine.
Maybe someone here could create the list, if Mike creates the optional interface. Thus the list and it’s function could be treated like a skin.
Hehe, ofcourse cities and countries aren’t just made overnight, but weather stations can be set up pretty fast, and who knows how fast they’re registered at weather.com…?
After sleeping and reading the response, I see that updating the list regularly, at the end-user side, wouldn’t make much sense, since updates don’t occur that often. Maybe there should be a button for updating the list, or a new list could just be downloaded from this site, somehow…
I think maybe the list would just be sent out with WW, and the list would just have to be updated one time on one computer, for each install, or maybe every other, or maybe even every minor or major release.
The programmatical part of creating the list is rather straight forward, and the use of stuff like wget or cmds, wouldn’t make sense, since retrieving and manipulating data is what dl and WW already do, so modifying this to get city info shouldn’t be that much work. And whether to use for- or while-loops, is mostly just a matter of taste, in my opinion, and why did you leave out do-whiles and maybe even gotos??? 
Depending on the server of singerscreations.com, the list might even be an online script, so you could download the newest list whenever you’d like to. And if the list would get too big, it’s only clear text, so it could be massively compressed, either to get decompressed client-side, or just on demand or startup, from within WW…
And searching could maybe be implemented with some degree of regular expressions, so you might be able to search for strings like “new *ork”…?
Anyways, I think it’s a good idea to have the searching facility, and it seems to be quite possible to make it work…
hallo to everyone
I see this thema is getting interesting for the WW users, so Im glad to see that my thread is not “a single voice in the desert” :iconbiggrin:
Currently if I select Add City and key in “New York” I see a list of 4 cities that meet that criteria. Where does this data come from? If I key in “New Yourk” I get no hits. If I key in “New” I get no hits.
well, exactly what I ment. If you dont know how exactly the city is spesified by weather.com, you have to spend time untill you find it out, thatswhy the suggestion for improving makes sense for me. Especially difficult will be for cities having other international names, f.e. M?nchen-Munich, N?rnberg-Nuremberg ( or even Nurnberg… or … I even dont know what can be, have seeing 2-3)… ect.
I dont know the technical part of how and what is better how to create that kind of city-list, so unfortunatly here I can not help. But I thing it should be possible to use the weather.com database to do it.
The question is is Mike able to implementate this idea into WW. With other words is it possible that WW uses somehow that list of the cities to improve the searching process?
I hope yes… it will be really fine!
just for info , mask like B*, Thailand doesnt give any results :???:
EdP, can you please confirm that searching with Letter*, Country is successful?
I have seen nothing saying it has been implemented.
what exactly means that? Is it positive or negative answer?
Sorry my English… :???:
It was a positive as far as what the proposed enhancement should do.
When, and IF, Mike decides to take on this fantastic suggestion that you requested this is how it should work.
At this point unfortunately it does not do that.
If you read this thread ways were discussed for this to be done with no change required of weather.com.
WW provides more than what weather.com makes available. Look at the weather icons and the map links. This could be another enhancement to weather.com’s abilities. And if properly coded could be used for other applications.