GNOME Weather applet, shown in , retrieves and displays various weather information. To add this applet to a Panel, right-click on the Panel and choose + + + +Panel+ + + + + ->Add to panel+ + + + + ->Applet+ + + + + ->Utility+ + + + + ->GNOME Weather+ + + + .
GNOME Weather displays the current temperature and weather conditions in numeric and iconified form inside the applet. For further information, double-click on the applet. This will open up the Weather Information Window, shown in . This displays the current weather information and either a one-day or five-day forecast.
Right-clicking on the applet brings up a menu containing the following items:
Update refreshes the weather information and display.
Properties opens the Properties dialog.
Help displays this document.
About shows basic information about GNOME Weather Applet, inluding the applet's version and the author's name.
You can customize GNOME Weather applet by right-clicking on it and choosing Properties. This will open the Properties dialog(shown in ), which allows you to change various settings.
The properties in the Basic tab are:
Update Interval This option determines how often GNOME Weather will connect to the server(s) and retrieve weather information. Current conditions, forecast and radar map (if enabled) will be downloaded
![]() | Note About Server Updates |
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Note that the Update Interval only determines how often your computer downloads information from the server(s). The update time shown in the Current Conditions tab (viewed by double-clicking on the applet) indicates when those measurements were renewed on the server, rather than when they were last retrieved. |
![]() | Disabling Automatic Updates and Using Manual Updates |
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You can disable automatic updates by unchecking the Update enabled box. On the other hand, you can also force GNOME Weather to perform an update by choosing the corresponding option in the popup menu. These two options are very useful if you have an intermitant internet connection, such as a laptop or modem provides. |
Update enabled Select this if you would like GNOME Weather to automatically download the latest weather information at the time interval specified by Update. Deselect this if you would only like weather updates to be done manually, by right-clicking on the applet and selecting Update.
Use metric By default GNOME Weather uses the imperial system of units. Select this box to use metric units. The units used are shown in .
Detailed Forecast Select this if you would like GNOME Weather to retrieve the full five day forecast for your particular area. Note that these forecasts may not be available for some locations.
The forecast retrieved when this button is not selected is a brief forecast for the broader area containing the selected location (usually the entire state) and typically is a 5-day forecast.
![]() | Forecast Availability |
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Note that the detailed forecasts downloaded from IWIN are available only for US cities. |
The properties in the Network tab should be used if your computer is located behind a firewall. These properties are:
Use proxy Select this button if your computer is behind a firewall and you must use an HTTP proxy to access the Web.
Proxy host Enter your proxy host IP address here (if you are using a HTTP proxy).
Username Enter your username here.
Password Enter your password here. (Note that this password will be saved in a private configuration file but will not be encrypted.)
The Location tab allows you to specify the geographic location that you would like GNOME Weather applet to display the weather information for. Click on any plus (+) symbol to expand the tree or any minus (-) symbol to collapse a tree branch. Select the city or region by clicking with the first mouse button.
Locations are organized in a three-level hierarchy. The top level contains broader geographical areas, the second contains sub-regions of these areas and the last contains the particular locations. This hierarchy is essentially based on the way information is organized in the US NWS (National Weather Service), and that is the reason that the US and Canada appear on the topmost level.
After you have made all the changes you want, click on OK to apply the changes and close the Properties dialog. To cancel the changes and return to previous values, click the Cancel button.
GNOME Weather has a homepage at http://gweather.dhs.org/. Here you can find the latest Locations file, which is periodically updated with new cities, as sent in by users. If your city is not included in the distribution, please send an email to Spiros Papadimitriou (<spapadim+@cs.cmu.edu>) with the necessary information and it will be included in the next release.
You may also want to visit the homepage if you are curious to see what's new.
Even though GNOME Weather now uses non-blocking I/O to retrieve data from the network, there are still some steps that block execution. Most notably, establishing a TCP connection to remote hosts is a blocking operation. Because the NWS and IWIN web servers are often heavily loaded, this step may take a significant amount of time. While that happens, the application is unable to respond to CORBA requests from the Panel. In its current implementation, the Panel iterates through all applications and sends frequent CORBA requests (eg. for saving state). If an applet cannot respond for any reason, then the Panel will block waiting for a response.
While the Panel is blocked, it will not respond to any user (or application) requests. For instance, Panel movement and Panel menus (the ones that appear upon a right click) will not work. However, other applets in the Panel should work (unless they have made a CORBA request to the Panel, eg. for querying Panel size). As soon as the blocking operation in GNOME Weather completes, things should return to normal (and user interface requests that were buffered will be executed).
There is an experimental version of GNOME Weather that uses a separate thread for HTTP processing, which may be incorporated (temporarily) in the next release. However, the final solution is gnome-vfs which will be part of GNOME 2.0 and will offer cross-platform support for fully asynchronous I/O.