That's too bad, but not surprising.

The money grubbers have spoken!

I'm packin' up my stuff and moving to Mars.

This may well happen to every desktop application (not only DX) using a feed.

I wonder though, will this happen if the METAR code is used? I know that with the Winstep weather module there were problems with the Weather Channel feed but not for those using the METAR code.

That might be the solution... not every location has a METAR code, but a close by location might...

@sViz - you might try pm'ing Jcrabbit (Jorge). He might have some good ideas for you... {I hope }

Damn...

so many freeloaders here at Wincustomize? of course those services want to earn money.

i use Rainmeter with BBC Weather (thanks British taxpayers )

i hope this dosent affect the sysmetrix weather.... uvah? do you know if it would?

Sysmetrix also uses METAR.

METAR information is retrieved by parsing a METAR coded string from an actual web page at NOAA, so it's unlikely it will ever go down unless they change the URLs or the page format. The problem with METAR is that it does not include forecast information, only very detailed current conditions, which are reported by airports all over the world.

The other problem is that because the information relies on airports and not weather stations, METAR does not support as many locations as, say, Weather.com.

Now let me say something about the Weather providers: I fully understand them wanting to get paid for the information. That is not the problem. The problem is HOW MUCH they want to charge for that information - they're absolutely crazy! Weather information is simply NOT worth its weight in gold, unless you're a weather service of some kind and make all your profit from that.

Let me give you an example regarding Weather.com. I think it will make your hair stand, it sure did mine:

Had a look at their Pricing Wizard page for PC gadgets. They want $977.98 per month for 2,000,000 monthly data requests, which is their maximum permitted number of requests. That's an outrageous price, IMO.

Furthermore, 2 million requests per month may seem like a lot, but if you take into account that the forecast in Winstep applications is updated every hour, then you'll know that each running copy of Nexus or Xtreme would be making 24 requests per day.

2,000,000 / 30 days = 66,666 requests allowed per day. Divide that by 24 hours/requests and, at most, those 2 million permitted requests per month would only be enough for 2,777 copies of active Winstep applications. Even if weather forecast requests were cached and only performed once every 24 hours, those 2,000,000 requests would only be enough for about 66,000 Winstep users.

It's nearly impossible to say how many Winstep applications are in use today, as, besides the regular user base, lots of people are constantly installing and uninstalling Winstep Xtreme and Nexus. But it's a LOT more than 66,000, that's for sure.

So, not only is the price they're asking outrageous (even for a commercial application like Winstep Xtreme: Winstep is in the business of selling Windows customization applications, NOT weather information, which is just a commodity for its users), as they also impose unreasonable limits.

And I personally know the current price of bandwidth, and I can tell you it does NOT justify in ANY way the price they want. Not even close by an order of magnitude.

I'm really only interested in the desktop feeds for current conditions anyway, when I'm wanting forecasts I want more detailed information and look harder.  "Rain tomorrow" isn't enough information for me anyway. Perhaps I'm not the only one.  I do find the current conditions to be extremely helpful though.

So I suppose if I had to choose between only current conditions or nothing at all, only current conditions would be an easy choice for me.

The problem is that METAR information needs a script to parse it from the HTML page and decode the information itself. Here is an example of a METAR string for the current conditions at Lisbon Portugal:

2012/03/29 18:00 LPPT 291800Z 10007KT CAVOK 21/03 Q1014

Jorge... thanks for cruising by.

66,001 - renewed.

omg Jorge!!!!

So....What WILL happen now then ??

JC, do you think that it´s the beginning of the end....? for real ??

The end?  No.

It may be time for the community to find a more extensible plugin for DesktopX.  Something that can be easily modified to handle these types of changes.

So, do I stop making weather widgets? Or wait and see?

Nope, not at all. There are always alternatives, listen to Zubaz.

When Weather.com closed their XOAP feed in November with barely any advanced warning (two weeks warning, or so), I got pissed off and coded support for two alternative weather feeds (besides METAR). If one fails, the other is used as a backup.

In the mean time I found out that the XML feed is still available, so now Winstep applications have four possible feeds: METAR/NOAA, Weather.com, MSDN and Google.

Nothing like some redundancy.

Nothing like some redundancy.

First goes the weather then goes.....................

.............the memory, or is it the hair?