Man, weather.com really sucks. I bet I could make a better one in a day. | Hacker News Reader

Man, weather.com really sucks. I bet I could make a better one in a day.

forecaster.ws

57 pointscarpal48 comments

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.

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...)

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.

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

Simpleweather did one odd thing: when I typed my city in the search box, it showed one result. Since it didn't have a line beath it I didn't even realize it was a hyperlink.

If there's one result, take them to it.

One good thing tho: it knew that that Celsius is used everywhere outside the US.

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.

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

I wonder why that is...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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. :-)

Weird. It comes straight from the National Weather Service, so it must be something strange with their data. Some sanity checking would be advisable, though.

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?

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!

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

Weather for: Toronto [Go]

Weather for Toronto, Kansas

Right now it is 45XF.

Hmm.

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.

http://forecaster.ws/forecast?lookup=paris

Paris, Arkansas

Great !

"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

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

Pretty cool.

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

"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".

I'm getting my forecast data from http://www.weather.gov/xml/#nonSOAP (You can read about that in my site's about (http://forecaster.ws/about.html) page). The current observations are a little more complex- you have to find the closest observation station to that zip code and look it up by the four-digit station code. Then you can look it up like: http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/KFTY.xml

.... 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

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.

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...

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

You should add current conditions, too.

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

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

Sometimes I like to check other cities...

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.

no radar? booo

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!

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

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

Yes, Paul.

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

You did a good job.

C/F would be nice.

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

you have a long way to go.

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