
Man, weather.com really sucks. I bet I could make a better one in a day. - carpal
http://forecaster.ws
======
zamfi
Heh. AppJet is perfect for building & hosting things like this. I couldn't
resist whipping up an AppJet app for it:

<http://weather.appjet.net/>

You can check out the source at <http://source.weather.appjet.net/>. It's
about 75 lines of code. Feel free to clone/modify it.

~~~
henning
Are there plans to make it easy to label AppJet code as under certain license
terms? (Creative Commons, GPL, LGPL, BSD, Microsoft's 'Shared Source'
silliness...)

------
henning
Feature request: let me give you my email address and my zip code so you can
send me an email in case it's likely to rain in my area that day. I check my
email every morning over breakfast so it could work out nicely.

If you want to put some advertisements (that aren't obnoxious) along with the
data, I really don't care. I am a moderately affluent college-aged male who
enjoys buying electronics, games, and other goods online on a frequent basis.

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bmaier
Pretty nice, these guys: <http://www.simpleweather.com> have done a pretty
good job at it too. You should put your minds together.

~~~
chandler
I've always been a fan of wunderground (<http://wund.com>). In addition to the
main site, it has similar functionality to what's described in the article
with its mobile/iphone subsites.

~~~
dcurtis
Hmm, wund and wunderground show different temperature data for my city.

I wonder why that is...

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carpal
A little project I did over the holidays. I got sick of how slow and cluttered
weather.com was, so I whipped up this little service. I hope other people can
find it useful.

It took me about a day. It is written in Rails. It contains about 100 lines of
application code.

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iamelgringo
Nicely done. I'd like it better if the data was centered instead of left
justified.

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rrival
Feature requests: ip to location or save zip in a cookie that's easy to
change. The most annoying part of weather.com for me, aside from the clutter,
is typing in a zip. Having the forecast oriented horizontally like a calendar
would be nice. ical integration would be pretty slick.

~~~
carpal
I find the vertical forecast easier to digest. I'll experiment with horizontal
layouts.

Doing geolocation would be sweet. I'll try it out.

~~~
paulgb
I've always thought it would be cool for there to be a site that just looks at
your IP and gives you the local weather and time and links to other relevant
info.

~~~
notanumber
Wouldn't work for people behind a corporate firewall. My old employer used to
route all of its traffic through the head office in the US even though we were
in Canada.

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Funky_
Works great if you live in the US. It' s broken for the rest of the world. :)

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jcd
I've been using the forecasts on <http://weather.gov> lately. In fact, using
the search field on the left, I entered my zipcode and got taken to a nice
forecast page with an obnoxiously long URL that I then bookmarked in Safari
and set up as a hotkey in QuickSilver. Now I type Cmd-Space at any time to be
taken to a perfect forecast summary with a disgustingly rich set of maps,
radar, and satellite images, discussion of the forecast by the forecaster,
etc., all a click or two away.

My setup curve was a bit long, but now that it's set up it's unbelievably easy
to check the weather. So if you could rig up an app that even approximates
that without all the manual setup work that I had to put into it, then I'm
sure you'd find hordes of users.

Nice job.

------
ecuzzillo
Googling "temperature berkeley, CA" works just as well, and it's built into
your Firefox search bar.

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josefresco
I usually don't plug anything here but this is directly related to my latest
weather startup: <http://www.OtherWeather.com>

Better interface and layout than weather.com (less ads), social influence
(each forecast is rated and users ranked), Google map mashup, user profile
pages and weather widgets/forecast RSS feed.

I just launched, and haven't had the time to promote but check us out.

------
icky
Bug report: It's not -2147483648 degrees here, nor is that even possible in
this universe...

Edit: It appears to be fixed now. :-)

~~~
mhartl
It is possible! Negative temperatures are perfectly well-defined (see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature>). In fact, they are
_higher_ than positive temperatures. There is a discontinuity in the
traditional temperature system at 0, and the _highest_ possible temperature is
0-, i.e., zero approached from the left. The lowest temperature (the
traditional "absolute zero") is 0+.

Perhaps a more sensible system is one that uses \beta = -1/kT to measure
temperature, where k is Boltzmann's constant. This temperature scale runs from
-infinity to +infinity, with no discontinuities.

-2147483648 is still probably a bug, though. :-)

------
plusbryan
You're right that weather.com really sucks, but it's much better at finding
locations. On forecaster, zip codes seem to work, but trying to type in
Monterey, CA results in Monterey, Louisiana. Monterey CA results in Monterey
Indiana. If you have multiple results, how about giving me a list?

------
slashcom
I love it. The app is designed like a perfect iphone app, but when rendered on
the iphone, the huge orange text caused it to render everything small. Other
than that, it's perfect; easy to use, immediate information that I want!

~~~
carpal
Try it now. It should be much more iPhone-palatable.

------
alex_c
Weather for: Toronto [Go]

Weather for Toronto, Kansas

Right now it is 45XF.

Hmm.

~~~
nailer
Same thing: I typed Melbourne and ended up on some city in Florida with two
old guys, rather than the city with 4 million people.

------
wmeredith
"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."

Hmm.. I'll bet you cant. /snark

I got this error twice.

entries: "64055" "Kansas City"

system: Firefox 2.0.0.11 Mac OS X 10.4

------
utnick
Great!

I hate how on weather.com if I type in Dallas, TX it takes me to another page
where it asks me if I meant Dallas, TX, United States. SO ANNOYING

------
brk
Pretty cool.

So, what are your TOS? Can I scrape your data for a home automation/monitoring
project I've been working on?

~~~
mynameishere
"Can I scrape _your_ data"

You might want to just scrape it from wherever he's scraping it from.

.................

Also, I found a bug:

 _Sorry, we couldn't find a result for "new york city"._

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aristus
.... Um, doesn't work?

(Texas) Sorry, we couldn't find a result for "77915".

(New York) Sorry, we couldn't find a result for "12345".

90210 works

~~~
carpal
Are those valid zip codes? Neither 77915 or 12345 are in my database of zip
codes.

I have a table that has the lat/long of zip codes so that I can find the
closest observation station.

Edit: If I can't find the zip, I'll default to that state's center. So even
invalid zip codes like 12345 will "work"- in this case, it'll go to around
Schenectady.

~~~
irrelative
Having worked there, I can confirm that 12345 is a valid zip code -- it's
technically the zip code for the GE plant in Schenectady. It was at one point,
large enough to warrant its own zip code...

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mhb
That's great. If you add hour-by-hour and zip code cookie, it would be
perfect. Thanks.

------
dcurtis
You should add current conditions, too.

"Right now, it's 39 degrees and Sunny."

~~~
carpal
I kind of figured you could look outside for that. Temperature is a little
harder to gauge.

~~~
dcurtis
Sometimes I like to check other cities...

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jakewolf
yeah, noaa.gov has tons of great stuff to play with. we're going to be using a
bunch of it in creating new tools for homeowners.

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transburgh
no radar? booo

~~~
jraines
I think there's enough of a need for 'just the forecast' to build this app.

Feature creep is exactly why weather.com sucks (well, that and ads).

That being said -- a replacement feature that's more in line with simplicity
and 'just the data' would be an hour by hour forecast. That's what most people
use the radar for anyway. Well, except when there's a severe storm. For that,
you could add . . . . [hours later] . . . and then you just have to secure the
rights to www.weather.com!

~~~
transburgh
I was just kidding. I do like the app. You did a good job of keeping it clean.

------
PStamatiou
I take it you're ATL-based as well?

~~~
carpal
Yes, Paul.

(This is Erik Peterson. We met at ATL Startup Weekend. Damned Internet
handles. Using your name is a good idea, huh?)

------
initself
You did a good job.

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dyu
C/F would be nice.

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k4st
That's why you need to use the weather network.

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mkull
you have a long way to go.

