AccuWeather, Todays meeting 2009/07/16

[sgtevmckay]

READ ENTIRE POST!!!


Ok folks

The easy part is almost complete.

I have spoken with Mr. Sylvie Directly, and the folks at AccuWeather are in the understanding of who we are and what we do.

They do have a few provisos
The following is the agreement that I must return with a ya or nay.

I would have the folks here at the forum over look this with me, debate what is written, before I agree in my name as to the continuing forward of this idea.

The following is the agreement:
Thanks, SGT. Thanks for the additional information.
I can provide access to our free API if you agree to the following terms and conditions:

TERMS OF USE

The data feed of AccuWeather is provided to you free of charge for non-commercial purposes in exchange for your promise to:

• display the AccuWeather.com logo, which would link to our homepage (we will provide you with our logo)

• include at least one deep link (such as a link to an extended forecast or hour-by-hour forecast), which would link to the relevant page on our site (we will show you how to deep link to our site).

The data feed is provided “as is” and AccuWeather makes no warranties or guarantees regarding the accuracy of the weather content. We reserve all rights to the logo AccuWeather.com and the data feed. If any issues regarding excessive use or misuse of the data feed arise, we will contact you for resolution. AccuWeather reserves the right to discontinue the data feed, if we deem necessary.

Let me know if you are willing and able to comply with these terms, and I will send you information on how to access our weather data. Our feed provides current conditions and five-day forecast data. Hopefully the information contained will be what your application requires.

Regards,

Michael

The updates from the site run approximately every 7.5 minutes, but Mr. Sylvie suggests no more than 15 minutes for our updates, just to be safe.

I also have Mr. Sylvie looking into a title of AccuWeather in instances where a graphic would be inappropriate (ie. HUD Vision skin). He believes that this should not be an issue, so long as AccuWeather is a fixture on the skin.

I am also tempted to limit the release of information, although this would be pointless, as anyone who downloads the skin will be able to access the appropriate what have you to access the page anyways.

I am willing to stick my neck out on this one for the community and Rainmeter at large, and post necessaries to the code page Wiki.

I need at least GhostMatrix, Mr. Morely, Dragonmage, and gschoppe to ring in on this before I consider moving forward.

I also want everyone elses opinion here as well.

Understand this will be a Community responsibility

What is everyone's thought?

UPDATE:
I will take in all concerns, questions, and suggestions until 1600 US MTN Time, and I will then compile a list from the posts here, and then e-mail a collective response to Mr. Sylvie at AccuWeather. If a common/mutual ground can be obtained, then hopefully we will have a generalized access page by weeks end.

Everyone cross their fingers and hopefully we can get some more Magic going.

[jsmorley]

I think it's fine and folks can decide for themselves if they want to use Accuweather or go with a site which doesn't ask for the skin to contain attribution. The only thing I would be careful of, as you alluded to, is not to make promises you can't keep. If anyone at all uses the feed in a skin and posts it on DevArt or Customize.org then all bets are off on controlling how it is used. People can use the code to create skins without any links to the company, improperly code it so it hits the feed every 2 minutes, etc. Not much you will be able to do about it. If Accuweather thinks the feed isn't working out in their best interests they can always take it down I suppose, but you don't want to be responsible or have to try to play "cop", looking for skins that don't comply and contacting the authors.

[sgtevmckay]

agreed.

I have advised them that this will be an open to all type of situation.

And you are correct, I am an IT Admin, and I am lazy by nature. I will not be playing cop :!:
I have left the arrangments to them regarding the possibility of a shut down.
The information to Rainmeter, will be specific to Rainmeter.

Mr. Sylvie made it clear; that although there is no bandwidth limits, any over use of the bandwidth would be determined by their IT department.

I just got off the phone from a conference call (3 hours :shock: : ) with Mr. Sylvie and 2 others, and they are satisfied with our software and community at large. They advise that there should not be too many issues, as they also have skin builders at Mozilla that have created addons for Firefox, and that is there largest single code page access.

Ask me just about anything, shoot; I am thinking to apply for work witrh these guys!

[bhadkow]

I think it's fine and folks can decide for themselves if they want to use Accuweather or go with a site which doesn't ask for the skin to contain attribution. The only thing I would be careful of, as you alluded to, is not to make promises you can't keep. If anyone at all uses the feed in a skin and posts it on DevArt or Customize.org then all bets are off on controlling how it is used. People can use the code to create skins without any links to the company, improperly code it so it hits the feed every 2 minutes, etc. Not much you will be able to do about it. If Accuweather thinks the feed isn't working out in their best interests they can always take it down I suppose, but you don't want to be responsible or have to try to play "cop", looking for skins that don't comply and contacting the authors.

yep!! i completely agree with you.,
one think can be done though , hide the values somewhere in the code ( the code will be huge right??) so that not everyone can modify it!!! logo thing is not much a problem, but the real problem would be with 'update' rates!! so hide it!! but, it can be found easily!! (at least not by everyone!)

[sgtevmckay]

Unfortunately this would not be possible
Fortunately it allows the community to expand itself

Two edged sword.

Understand once you open the ini, it has all the information needed.
Updates
web address for the parse (XML)

everything you need to get started is right there in the ini file.

there are a couple of immediate issues, as they will give us the needed API and the web page embeds, so I am also believing that the XML address has to be in there somewhere; right?
Information on the web does not come from no where!?!!

Of course, they are waiting to here back from us here with any questions or issues we may need addressed.

[jsmorley]

yep!! i completely agree with you.,
one think can be done though , hide the values somewhere in the code ( the code will be huge right??) so that not everyone can modify it!!! logo thing is not much a problem, but the real problem would be with 'update' rates!! so hide it!! but, it can be found easily!! (at least not by everyone!)

The part of the code which does the website parse is VERY short...

[MeasureWeatherRSS]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=Plugins\WebParser.dll
UpdateRate=1500
Url=UrlToAccuweather.com
RegExp="(?siU)<weather ver="(.*)">(.*)<tmp>(.*)</tmp>(.*)<t>(.*)</t>(.*)<icon>(.*)</icon>(.*)<day d="1" t="(.*)" dt="(.*)">(.*)<hi>(.*)</hi>(.*)<low>(.*)</low>(.*)<icon>(.*)</icon>(.*)<t>(.*)</t>(.*)<day d="2" t="(.*)" dt="(.*)">(.*)<hi>(.*)</hi>(.*)<low>(.*)</low>(.*)<icon>(.*)</icon>(.*)<t>(.*)</t>(.*)<day d="3" t="(.*)" dt="(.*)">(.*)<hi>(.*)</hi>(.*)<low>(.*)</low>(.*)<icon>(.*)</icon>(.*)<t>(.*)</t>(.*)"
StringIndex=1

There isn't going to be a way to hide anything. This isn't a plugin where a developer can make it do certain things and the "user" is stuck with it. This is just a plain text script language and anyone with five minutes of experience with Rainmeter is going to be able to do with this feed what they will. We can explain the conditions here and in sample skins we make available, but let's remember. Rainmeter is really a scripting language tool, not an application. Microsoft doesn't call me and tell me what I can or can't do with C++, Adobe doesn't tell me what kind of web sites I can write in DreamWeaver. They would be crazy to even attempt to, and the same holds true with this.

You would have to rely on the basic honesty and good nature of the Rainmeter community to do the right thing. I'm sure it will be fine, it seems like a good bunch pretty much everywhere I run into people messing with Rainmeter.

[jsmorley]

By the way, you might ask them if they would like to provide the 40 or so "icons" needed to use their feed. A thought I had was that if each of the icons had a really, really tiny AccuWeather logo/image on the bottom right corner, that might well encourage folks to display the logo in their skins. Nothing stopping folks from doing a google search and finding the hundreds of weather icon sets available (there must be 20 on DevArt alone), but if it was unobtrusive most may not bother and AccuWeather gets what they want.

[jsmorley]

Looks like they don't really have a "logo" that would translate down to an icon any smaller than about 64x64 (pretty big for a weather icon in a skin). Their only logo seems to be:



Which probably isn't going to work. If you shrink it very much at all it becomes unreadable. The favicon for their website is small, but pretty generic.



Not sure they would consider using that enough attribution.

[sgtevmckay]

Noted

Will ask

Also I have no idea as to how to extract them, but there is the following:
These are made for the Forecastfox addon
http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/packs/index.html

I think 2 of these sets are the old AccuWeather icon sets

[jsmorley]

Noted

Will ask

Also I have no idea as to how to extract them, but there is the following:
These are made for the Forecastfox addon
http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/packs/index.html

I think 2 of these sets are the old AccuWeather icon sets

Ahh. You can get their icons right here:

http://www.accuweather.com/accunet/graphics-icons.asp

and here is a mapping list (very handy for any weather skin author actually!)

http://accunet.accuweather.com/wx/accunet/symset.htm