Good PPC Weather Apps?

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I'm looking for a good weather application that can download weekly weather for multiple cities.

I'm trialing WorldMate which is a nice program, but it's a bit bulky for me as I don't need any of its other functionality other than weather (CityTime provides me with world time info and I have unit converters already).

I've also tried Stocks&Weather as well as ADB weather. They're both "Today plug-ins" which I don't like too much as my Today page is quite full already and weather is not something I need to look at all the time during the day.

Anyone? Thanks.

[fyiguy]

I haven't seen too many applications that can do multiple cities. Personally I just dial on my cell(via voice prompt), one of my favorite services that uses VoiceXML (so no finger pushing is needed extremely useful when driving)called TellMe, you just say the city,state or zip you are in and you get the weather and even an extended. You can also get CNet News, Stocks, Sports, Lottery numbers, Directions, Traffic Conditions,Movie theatre times, Airline flight information, hail a taxi,limo, or livery, rent a car or book a hotel, setup a wake up call, leave a message for other people to hear, and much more...

The number for the Tell Me service is 1-800-555-TELLME or 1.800.555.8355 and say 'Tell Me More', then you can choose your category by talking. To sign up for the free service and to customize it go here (http://www.1-800-555-tell.com/). This will link all your preferences to your phone number.

A really cool FREE service, that I use just about every day...

It is a pretty good option.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Thanks for the tip. That's good info.

I'll definitely have to try that next time I'm back in the US. Alas, toll-free numbers are not so toll-free in foreign countries and you're right, there doesn't appear to be too many apps that can do multiple cities. I suppose I could rely on AvantGo, but starting up AvantGo and then navigating the links can be rather cumbersome. Then I could also just use my cellphone's data service, but GPRS costs add up quickly.

[cavuu]

Thanks for the tip. That's good info.

I'll definitely have to try that next time I'm back in the US. Alas, toll-free numbers are not so toll-free in foreign countries and you're right, there doesn't appear to be too many apps that can do multiple cities. I suppose I could rely on AvantGo, but starting up AvantGo and then navigating the links can be rather cumbersome. Then I could also just use my cellphone's data service, but GPRS costs add up quickly.

On Avantgo's website you can set up 'custom' site pages.
Go to my account then custom channels
Find the weather pages on the web, copy and paste/add them to your account.
I have 2 weather radar's and one local text weather. Works well

[Fzara]

Avantgo should allow you to make custom links, this way they're accessible fast.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

On Avantgo's website you can set up 'custom' site pages.
Go to my account then custom channels
Find the weather pages on the web, copy and paste/add them to your account.
I have 2 weather radar's and one local text weather. Works well
Yeah, I've stopped using Avantgo for a while (too much delay loading in PIE), but I'll probably come back to it for the weather purposes if no other viable options exist.

Thanks guys (cavuu / Fzara),
Ekkie

[Kati Compton]

Go to Yahoo!'s mobile site (http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/), which is actually intended for phones. This is essentially the same thing you get through AvantGo. Select weather, then put in a city. When the page comes up with the weather report for your chosen city, bookmark it as a Mobile Favorite. You should be able to indicate that you want it as offline content, and set up how often you want it to sync with the internet. Then when you synchronize your PPC, you get the weather report, viewable from favorites. You can organize it by putting all the city weather reports into a folder under mobile favorites.

It's a nice trick that works for the other aspects of Yahoo! that work on AvantGo. Once I figured this out, I really have no reason to use AvantGo anymore. I have a directory holding weather reports for various cities, a directory holding the theater listings for a bunch of local theatres, and a directory of news reports (you can link to the news "category", then specify when making the mobile favorite to go down 1 link from the main page).

Hope that helps.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Go to Yahoo!'s mobile site (http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/), which is actually intended for phones. This is essentially the same thing you get through AvantGo. Select weather, then put in a city. When the page comes up with the weather report for your chosen city, bookmark it as a Mobile Favorite.
<...>
It's a nice trick that works for the other aspects of Yahoo! that work on AvantGo. Once I figured this out, I really have no reason to use AvantGo anymore.
Ahhh... so the Mobile Favorites can actually be useful!? I've ignored it all this time, but that sounds like a pretty slick option...

I really like the idea of just using it as a substitute for AvantGo. I'm just not all that fond of AvantGo. Thanks Kati.

[Kati Compton]

No problem. I also just submitted it as a news item, since I don't know how many people know you can do this...

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

No problem. I also just submitted it as a news item, since I don't know how many people know you can do this...
Good idea. We should collect a number of useful sites that are perfect for PPC screens. As I remember, AvantGo doesn't reveal the URLs that they use for their content.

[goirish!!]

I use Infuser. It links to Outlook with an Appointment so that you can view it from a PIM
http://www.infuzer.com/IDC/home/

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I use Infuser. It links to Outlook with an Appointment so that you can view it from a PIM
http://www.infuzer.com/IDC/home/
Thanks for the tip. This is actually quite an attractive solution. There is a monthly charge (albeit a small one), but seeing daily weather in my Calendar is much easier than opening a separate app...

I'll have to consider this...

[goirish!!]

I use Infuser. It links to Outlook with an Appointment so that you can view it from a PIM
http://www.infuzer.com/IDC/home/
Thanks for the tip. This is actually quite an attractive solution. There is a monthly charge (albeit a small one), but seeing daily weather in my Calendar is much easier than opening a separate app...

I'll have to consider this...

Fee?? The weather portion is free. At least I'm getting it free. I'm gonna look at their site but I wasn't aware of an fees except maybe for some of the sports stuff.

[Jorgen]

If you get the iSilo reader and iSiloX from http://www.isilo.com, the http://www.turcic.com/palm.shtml site provides a large number of links, including weather links for PDA's. Don't worry about the "palm"-word, just don't let Jason see you read it :)

iSilo is like AvantGo, except that you provide the offline content yourself.

Jorgen

[RickP in AZ]

Infuzer:
It actually *is* free, the whole problem arises from the fact that they have place the weather service in the "Premium" section. Trust me, I have been using it for about 6 months and have never been charged yet. (Of course in the future they may begin charging.)

Remember that in order to see the weather forecast on your PPC's today page you must change the options for the Appointment plug-in to show all day events. Start>Settings>Today (Personal tab)>Items (tab) and select the Calendar plug in>Options (button) and check "All Day Events"

[Kati Compton]

I don't suppose you know if you got much spam from this?

I was reading the privacy policy, and it basically said that if you're accessing content from a foreign site, your information would get sent to that site, and those sites may not respect your privacy.

[goirish!!]

I don't suppose you know if you got much spam from this?

I was reading the privacy policy, and it basically said that if you're accessing content from a foreign site, your information would get sent to that site, and those sites may not respect your privacy.

I assume that you are referring to Infuzer? Who knows about how much spam comes from who? When prompted for an email I usually use my "spam mail" account from Yahoo! :wink:

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

Go to Yahoo!'s mobile site (http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/), which is actually intended for phones. This is essentially the same thing you get through AvantGo. Select weather, then put in a city. When the page comes up with the weather report for your chosen city, bookmark it as a Mobile Favorite. You should be able to indicate that you want it as offline content, and set up how often you want it to sync with the internet. Then when you synchronize your PPC, you get the weather report, viewable from favorites. You can organize it by putting all the city weather reports into a folder under mobile favorites.

I'm trying this now... love that Yahoo link. I think that's the same Yahoo link that AvantGo uses. Anyway, I can't get the pages to show offline on my PPC.

I set them up as "Mobile Favorites". I didn't specify a time to sync, but I manually selected Synchronize all and verified that I could view the content while offline. I then ActiveSync'ed between my two devices and could see that there was "something" sync'ing in the "Mobile Favorites" category... but when disconnecting my PPC and running PIE, I either get the "connection settings error" (when I set CM to point to Work) or the "dial into GPRS" prompt (when I set CM to point to Internet).

Something I'm missing?

[Kati Compton]

I set them up as "Mobile Favorites". I didn't specify a time to sync, but I manually selected Synchronize all and verified that I could view the content while offline. I then ActiveSync'ed between my two devices and could see that there was "something" sync'ing in the "Mobile Favorites" category... but when disconnecting my PPC and running PIE, I either get the "connection settings error" (when I set CM to point to Work) or the "dial into GPRS" prompt (when I set CM to point to Internet).


I did test it... Hmmm. Are you doing it from the main page or from one of the small pages? I'd suggest starting with a single page, like the weather for a particular town, and see if you can get that to work. Something with a link depth of 0.... Call it "My Weather" or something obvious just in case....

Pardon me if this is a silly question, but are you accessing it on the mobile by clicking the little folder+* icon for Favorites, and then selecting the page? If you were trying to access the URL directly, that may not work when you're offline.... I think you have to access it via the "Favorite" link.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I did test it... Hmmm. Are you doing it from the main page or from one of the small pages? I'd suggest starting with a single page, like the weather for a particular town, and see if you can get that to work. Something with a link depth of 0.... Call it "My Weather" or something obvious just in case....
Right... did exactly all of that. Started simple as a proof-of-concept.

Now something just occurred to me though. My work laptop is running on a "hacked" Win2000 version (I don't mean hacked as in illegal, but hacked as in our corporate IT department made changes to our installations to make it more "idiot proof"). When looking at the pages I earmarked for synchronization, there's no option for link depth. In fact, I don't even have an option to "view content offline" under my File menu (that may have been done for security purposes). FTR, I'm running IE 5.5.

Pardon me if this is a silly question, but are you accessing it on the mobile by clicking the little folder+* icon for Favorites, and then selecting the page? If you were trying to access the URL directly, that may not work when you're offline.... I think you have to access it via the "Favorite" link.
Yeah, I was trying to pull it up through the Favorites link.

But as mentioned before, I think this problem runs deeper... Thanks for the help.

[Kati Compton]

Now something just occurred to me though. My work laptop is running on a "hacked" Win2000 version (I don't mean hacked as in illegal, but hacked as in our corporate IT department made changes to our installations to make it more "idiot proof"). When looking at the pages I earmarked for synchronization, there's no option for link depth. In fact, I don't even have an option to "view content offline" under my File menu (that may have been done for security purposes). FTR, I'm running IE 5.5.


I'm running IE 6 (at least, when I want to do anything with Mobile Favorites), so that might also have something to do with it.

FYI - on mine at least, I can select "Organize Favorites" from the Favorites menu, and select a particular link. There's a checkbox that indicates if I want to view it offline on the Organize Favorites dialog. There's a button right there called "Properties". Clicking it brings up another dialog with four tabs, and the last one ("Download") is what lists link depth. But like you said, that could be either the difference between IE 5.5 and 6, or something your company did with the installation. I'd try using "Help" on IE about favorites and viewing content offline - maybe the options are just reorganized and non-obvious on yours.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I'm running IE 6 (at least, when I want to do anything with Mobile Favorites), so that might also have something to do with it.
Perhaps, I may download IE 6 tomorrow while at work.

FYI - on mine at least, I can select "Organize Favorites" from the Favorites menu, and select a particular link. There's a checkbox that indicates if I want to view it offline on the Organize Favorites dialog. There's a button right there called "Properties". Clicking it brings up another dialog with four tabs, and the last one ("Download") is what lists link depth. But like you said, that could be either the difference between IE 5.5 and 6, or something your company did with the installation. I'd try using "Help" on IE about favorites and viewing content offline - maybe the options are just reorganized and non-obvious on yours.
Mine mimics your behavior right up to the point where properties brings up four tabs. Mine only brings up two (General and Secuirty). The help pages seem to indicate that a Download box IS here... nothing explicit but they mention that you should be able to specify how much is downloaded via the properties window.

I actually remember using this feature a long time ago on like IE5 or IE4.5 and it's been more or less the same. Perhaps if I download IE6, I'll get around this, but more than likely, I think my company did something to the registry or the like. I have admin rights, so I just have to find what they did and see if it's reversable.

Thanks for the try Kati.