Skinning tutorial and questions

Mike, it’s now been over a year since you said you were gonna make a simple skin example to use as a template - did you ever do this? If you did I’d like to know how and where to obtain it, and if not I’d just like some pointers to mess with the existing stuff…:

  • What are the differences between ‘skin.wwt’, ‘skini.wwt’, ‘skinwu.wwt’ and ‘skiniwu.wwt’ ? I get that the ‘wu’ is for WeatherUnderground, but why not put ‘wb’ in the others or make one skin to handle everything, maybe by using some new template tags?
  • Do you have a list or maybe even some documentation of all the template tags?
  • Did you ever look further into putting translation of the interface into the program?

I’m sure I will think of some more stuff to annoy you with, but not right now :wink:

Here’s a zipped skin named “Sample”:
http://www.box.net/shared/static/u9bhgv26rd.zip

Unzip it to your Weather Watcher Live skins folder. On Windows 7, you would unzip it to:
C:\Users[Username]\AppData\Roaming\WeatherWatcherLive\Skins\Interface

Here are the main skin files:

Default.html
This file loads into the main Weather Watcher Live window when Weather Watcher Live is installed, reinstalled, or a new skin is used for the first time. See the comments within.

Skin.wwt
This skin template is used for WeatherBug stations inside of the US.

Skini.wwt
This skin template is used for WeatherBug stations outside of the US.

Skinwu.wwt (not included)
This skin template is used for Weather Underground stations inside of the US.

Skiniwu.wwt (not included)
This skin template is used for WeatherBug stations outside of the US.

Four different skin template files are used because some of the weather data is not available outside of the US or at WeatherBug/Weather Underground weather stations. I chose not to combine all of the skin templates into a single file because it would be harder to maintain.

For a list of available template tags, click the “Template Examples” button in the “Advanced” → “Data Export” section of the Weather Watcher Live Options window.

I did not look into translating the interface. I have some ideas that should work, but it won’t be an easy task. I’m also not sure how I would translate the following areas:

  • Severe alerts
  • Daily text forecasts

Whau thanks :slight_smile: I was hoping that you’d give me a few pointers to the code of Splendid2 and a ‘look at the code and figure it out’ at best, but as always you really perform and deliver!
And the explanations of the files is very useful and to the point - now that ‘i’ makes sence too :smiley:

All in all it looks very good and extremely customizable, so this just might make another exciting adventure :stuck_out_tongue: at any rate I’m back in the game of skinning and got a few ideas…I’ll just start developing a little in the nearest future!

Also thanks for the pointer - I totally forgot the template tags were in the help file! But is it up-to-date? I saw an undocumented loop in one of the Splendid2 files ‘[DAILY SEQUENCE LOOP COUNT=2]’ and can’t find anything on the ‘SEQUENCE’ … are there any more…?

As for the translations, don’t do it if it’s too hard! Especially if the users don’t request it - I’m a danish person in Denmark, speaking danish, and still I prefer having software in english and actually get a little annoyed when it just chooses danish [or anything else other than english] for me!
That being said, the alert and forecast texts could be translated by translating the pieces of standard text they must be made up of - either by crowdsourcing or Google Translate [or something like that], or you could harvest a lot of texts and distill them for the syntax and text pieces used, and have that translated somewhat similar to any other texts?

EDIT: The sample skin doesn’t seem to work… I open the skins folder from the WWL options, unzip the sample skin to the folder ‘sample’ in the skins folder and it’s not seen by WWL - not even after a restart…?

MORE EDIT: The sample skin still doesn’t work, but copying the existing Splendid2 and replacing the .wwt files [and copying them to the ‘wu’ variants] works - except that it looks like WWL loads the US files :s

I created this sample skin a while ago, so some things have changed since then. Add the following link to the [Skin] section of your “Skin.ini” file:

MinVersion=7.0.11

If you dig through the Splendid2 skin, you might find a few undocumented tags. Again, some things have changed since I created this sample. I think you’ll find everything you need in the documented tags. If not, let me know.

It would be tough to translate the daily forecast text using Google Translate. The text is completely random, so the translation would have to be done in realtime – which would be slow.