BWeather 1.3
By James Marr
james@interius.com
www.interius.com/be
(c) 2000

What does it do?
Simply put? It gets the weather for you. You see, many people have a problem with pulling up the shades on their windows to see whether it is raining outside. BWeather softens the social stigma on these people. When having a conversation on the telephone with someone not suffering from this problem, you may simply look at your deskbar to examine that it is 87 degrees and sunny out, and proceed to have a rather meaningless conversation based upon this.

Is it true that you stole all of the code and didn't actually do any work?
Guilty. I in fact did not have the pleasure of banging my head against the wall in an attempt to decode the seemingly rather undocumented metar format. That enjoyable task was actually performed by Spiros Papadimitriou, the creator of GWeather. I lifted the parsing code and the icons from gweather with Spiros' consent. I also used Joe Kloss's libHTTP for, well, communicating with http servers. I decided to statically link against libHTTP because there were some bugs in some mostly unused parts that I needed. Once these bugs are fixed and a new version of libHTTP is released, I'll release a new version of BWeather that dynamically links against it. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience (although I can't imagine how it would).

Do you gots international game?
Well, as you used the wrong form of "got", I'll assume english isn't your first language. If english is your first language and you still asked that question, then I prey for your oh-so-poor soul. But yes, BWeather does gots international game as you put it. However, the service I use to get the forecast only supports the states (the UNITED states), but you can still get the temperature and the dew point and the humidity, or if you are feeling like a bad ass, you can cover up the humidity, and try to calculate it in your head using the temperature and the dew point. I think once you get good at it you will quickly find it a family activity the kids will enjoy that you won't feel guilty about later.

Ok, I'm looking at this. What does it mean?

I would hope the temperature is rather self evident. Just in case, it's the thing with the degree symbol after it. Here are the archaic symbols and their demonic meaning:

Normal Icon	Deskbar Icon	Description
		Sunny
		Partially Cloudy
		Overcast
		Raining
		Snowing What, you can't see it? Well, you can against the normal gray color.
		Thunder Storm! Look out little Timmy!

This readme is ugly!
Bite me.

Your icon is also ugly! It reminds me of road kill.
So it does, so it does. You see people, I'm not an artist... Well, I have been an artist, but without photoshop I'm like a 6 year old without training wheels! Yes, I do realize I could just reboot into windows, but I refuse. It's against my civil disabilities, or some messed up yet strangely confusing junk. Anyway, if you would like to make BWeather a better icon, I would be more than happy to steal it from you, and possibly give you ample credit. I would have to leave that choice up to the flip of a coin.

How about the preferences?


BWeather periodically updates its weather information. Update Frequency lets you set how often it should update itself. The slider rangers from 0 minutes on the left to 1 hour on the right. To disable BWeather from automatically updating its information, set Update Frequency to 0 minutes (labeled "Never").
The Metric button sets what units to display the weather in. If you don't check this button, BWeather will use colonial units (Fahrenheit, Knots, etc).
The Detailed Forecast button sets weather to get the forecast for your entire state or your specific zone. Setting this will usually give more accurate forecasts, but some areas may not have detailed forecasts available.
I'm not quite sure what the proxy stuff does. I woke up one day and it was just there. If you are behind one of these majestic creatures called a proxy server, you may want to experiment with these options; I sure haven't. In fact, if you do try it, and it works, why don't you email me and tell me. If you it doesn't work, please don't email me... Well, you can email me, and I'll probably fix the bugs in the code, but then I would have horrible nightmares for the remainder of my life. Is that really what you want?

How do I get back to preferences after I first open BWeather?
Right click in the BWeather window, it gives you lots of options. I would suggest using them. There are also some keyboard shortcuts you can use:
cmd-d -> Deskbar Mode
cmd-a -> About
cmd-p -> Preferences
cmd-i -> Information
cmd-u -> Update

What's this "InFOrmaTioN" Window?


This is where to go if you want more information than simply what the sky looks like and what temperature it is. Both tabs should be pretty much self explanatory... Unless of course you can't read, in which case this readme really won't help you much anyway. The only part I foresee being confusing to you is "METAR Time". What's that you ask? Is it a nick name for a large pregnant newt? No. Allow me to explain. NOAA updates its information at discrete times. "METAR Time" tells you when the NOAA servers received the information from your local airport. It is not when you last downloaded the information from the NOAA servers.

You're stupid, and didn't answer any of my questions.
Then email me, and I'll add your piddly little question to this even more pitiful should-be-faq-but-named-readme junk pile. Does that satisfy your need for death and destruction? No? Then try actually emailing me you pom pom. You can't expect your rage to be satisfied if you don't even try. People these days...

So Jimbo (pleases don't call me that), what have you been up to?
1.3 - Fixed a bug that made BWeather slaughter the deskbar (and I mean SLAUGHTER) on PPC's. Last release was my first PPC release, so I'm quite frankly amazed it worked at all. Thanks to Peter Schultz for pointing out my utter ignorance (and embarrassing me to the point that I must put his name on my list... my "to kill" list. It's a bit like my "to do" list I have for BWeather, only a lot more sinister.)
- Peter added a make file for compiling BWeather. If you like make files, and have been waiting to compile your very own copy of BWeather, now is the time to act.
- You now have control over the locations you see in the preferences. Open ~/config/settings/BWeather_locations with your favorite text editor, and you can have all kinds of silly location adding fun.
- I removed the proxy server settings from the preferences. The code is still there, just commented out. In short, it doesn't work. When BONE comes out, I'll write my own HTTP code and it will support proxy servers correctly. Until then, I apologies to everyone who is behind a proxy server.
- Cleaned up how the contextual menu works. Holding down the mouse button, right clicking, cnt-clicking, they all work. Yeah, that's right. I'm the pimp dady.
- Changed the labels on the Update Frequency in the preferences to be more clear. Left is less, right is more. Go all the way to the left (0 minutes) and it won't update at all.
- BWeather will now just draw a blank icon if it can't find a better icon instead of a planet with a strike through it (although it still will draw the planet if BWeather couldn't find any information for your area). This will help a lot of people in Europe.
1.2 - "Last Updated" changed to "METAR Time", and now properly reflects the time at which the server last updated it's information from your area.
- There is now only one Missouri and one Montana, instead of two Missouri's and no Montana's (thanks Larry).
- PPC version now available. The hero today is Jeremy for a PPC regex.
- Better display of temperatures less than -9 or more than 99 (thanks Gregor).
1.1 - Uses the R5 deskbar replicant API, so BWeather will automatically place itself in the deskbar after restarts (thanks Jason). Be sure to delete old versions of BWeather; it may cause problems if you don't.
- No longer crashes when loading a few places in California.
- Setting an update speed of over half an hour now works.
- The preference file is now version specific.
1.01 - Added (untested) proxy server support. It may or may not work. Please tell me either way.
- No longer assumes the system font is 10 point (thanks Oliver).
- This readme is now less-ugly.
1.0 - This was the first release. That's what happened, you frog.

Again, (c) 2000 James Marr
Please don't steal from me. Stealing is wrong.