I too have widgets that no longer work  . I've tried dissecting working stuff but with no luck (only know enough about coding to change the code in DX). If you figure it out can ya let me know? Much appreciated.

RedBuzzard

reply 21

I too have widgets that no longer work  . I've tried dissecting working stuff but with no luck (only know enough about coding to change the code in DX). If you figure it out can ya let me know? Much appreciated.

Yes it's a bummer. I've decided that it would take too much of my time to figure out how to skin weather widgets in Rainmeter now. The coding is different than it was and I'm not devoting myself to learning it at this point when there is an alternative  which is XWidget.

I have a bunch of non working weather in my gallery of over 1500 skins.  I have been slowly working to weed them out. Takes a lot of time.

Too bad one can't sort them by type, then eliminate them all at once.

This thing happens too often, I don't think I will do any more weather widgets/gadgets.

Funny how July Weather still works. Always has.

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/desktop_gadgets/45/ 

Did this monkeying around with XWidget and made this using another for a template but still can't figure out how it works LOL

Wow, Haven't seen you since forever!  Welcome back!

Glad to be back  

There's a skinner on DeviantArt named HipHopium who uses the Yahoo weather for his skins. He also has a video of how to set the weather in your area using the Yahoo weather.

https://www.deviantart.com/hiphopium/art/Lumiero-828277050 

As far as I know he is 'scrapping' the Yahoo website to get the information. The problem with this is that all it takes for the whole thing to stop working again is a small change on the format/presentation of the page - and those happen very often, turning these type of weather widgets into a support nightmare.

Going forward it looks like I'll be uploading XWidget weather via the XWidget process and my DA page. So far Lightstar has given me permission to do this for his skins.

Stay tuned.

To be fair,so is alternative way the Rainmeter's developer did on the its forum which 'scrapping' Weather.com. Because there are hardly any free,reliable and comprehensive weather providers out there. I believe XWidget's developer does pay for Accuweather.com the service.   

Sure, I was just pointing out the problem with this. It's a nightmarish headache for the developer.

Did you check Accuweather prices?! Also, isn't XWidget free? If so, how does the developer fund this?

I may be wrong now, but last time I checked the prices that the weather providers requested for queries, these were only suitable (or perhaps intended) for websites with not much traffic, not for free applications with tens of thousands of users, each making one weather query per hour.

For instance, I wouldn't mind paying for a reliable weather service (as I currently pay for IP Geo location services), but it would have to be a very reasonable amount with no query limitations. Don't forget the rate of free Nexus users to paying Nexus Ultimate/Winstep Xtreme users is HUGE and I am not in the business of selling weather applications - the weather widget in Winstep applications is just a very small part of a much bigger picture.

XWidget is free, but there are a lot of skins that are not available unless you sign up and pay $9.99. I was just visiting their site and didn't realize all the programs they had. 

That's right,you have to pay to get some skins/theme. 

I am not familiar with Accuweather,but I did check Darksky API,for free trial with unique key,a user would allow thousands calls a day;for pay/Enterprise that's another story. I have one Browser plugin which been using Darksky API a long time,must say it's very accurate and reliable as Weather.com

"Can I require my users to sign up for a developer's API key?No, your end-users should not sign up for Dark Sky API keys as a means for you to circumvent the daily cap of 1,000 free calls. The 1,000 free calls per day are intended for one developer or company to explore the API."

The TOS of all weather service providers forbids you from asking your users to apply for a key of their own. So, 1000 free queries per day, divided by 24 hours would barely cover the needs of 41 different users.

This said, their $0.0001 rate per query actually seems very reasonable until you start doing the math. Assuming you do not want to spend more than a reasonable $100 per month for the feed, this would be enough for 100/0.0001 queries, or 1 million queries per month. Seems like a lot, doesn't it?

However, each user would perform 24 queries per day times 30 days per month. So each user would consume 720 queries per month. Dividing 1,000,000 queries per 720 queries, one hundred bucks per month would barely cover the needs of 1,388 users. Even assuming ONLY 14,000 users of your free app, you would be paying over $1,000 per month for the privilege of offering a weather feed to people who have never and will likely never invest a single cent in your company's revenue.

There is simply no ROI for that. Do you guys understand now why SD stopped paying for the Accuweather feed (assuming that is what happened) ? The problem with these things is that they do not scale up with applications used by many thousands of users.

All that said, I still wonder why July Weather still works.  It is an old gadget.  AccuWeather.

I have no idea since I have never used DesktopX,but you're interested,maybe you should look for its URL or .dll for reference.

I mentioned Darksky API is that some of Rainmeter skins have implemented its service after wxdata.weather.com deprecated as of Jan 15,2020. For non-profit skins and one end-user, a thousand calls a day is definitely enough. The TOS did forbid that,then again we are talking Rainmeter skins though. 

I think your best bet would be pay the Darksky API enterprise service or Accuweather's,then implemented the key in your weather module,such as .dll or .exe,so the end users would just simply enter their location to get weather predictions which must be exactly what the XWidget and the Weather plugin did. To expect each end user to obtain an API key is really not practical in your case ( Winstep, a commercial software).  Tim Leland is the developer of Weather extension,you may email him for reference regarding Darksky API.

I uploaded my first XWidget Weather widget. It's for Dream by Lightstar.

https://www.deviantart.com/chuckoff57

Any other XWidget widgets I do can be found at the above link.