Lars Olav Torvik’s blog

I have had a lot of problems with the server this fall. I was not sure what caused this, but now the xml2json.larsolavtorvik.com is the prime suspect. That is the page used by the weather widget. Since I already spend to much money on this server (without much profits) I will have to rewrite the weather widget to use a different data source. Hopefully as soon as possible. When the new version is out I will close down the xml2json page. This mean that all weather widgets that do not get upgraded to the new version will no longer work! Sorry for this but I really need to lower the trafic since it causing problems for all other sites on the server.

Stay tuned for updates, hopefully soon!

Today it is 17.May and the Norwegian national day. Norwegian are always very interested in the weather for 17.May since we have big celebrations outdoors and many people plan to take out the barbecue. Not that I plan to be much outdoors today since I’m using crutches after a football injure earlier this week… arg! So since I have been spending some time indoor and to prepere us for the 17.May I have created a new release of the weather widget. Release 1.3.0 is available for download. This is big upgrade from last version so alot of code have been rewritten for this release. Some things you will notice and some “under the hood” fixes Overall I’m very pleased with this release and I hope you the user will be please too.

• Replaced the old template design with a much more versatile solution. You can now select the text and background color. The colors from the old template is still available in the color picker, in addition you can write whatever hex color code you want! Use your favorite image editor or an online color picker to select your perfect color. This should guarantee that the gadget matches any desktop background possible!
• All old background images have been replaced with new dynamic solution using CSS. This result in a minor design difference and makes it much easier for me to add more optional flyout pages etc in the future.
• When you add a new gadget instance it will try and retrieve the name, longitude and latitude based on your IP address! This will especially help all users not located in Norway.
• Default language on the gadget is now based on Windows regional setting. This makes it easier for non Norwegian speaking users since they will not get Norwegian as default language like they used to.
• The default gadget view should now get updated both when you close the settings window and the flyout. This is done so it easy to force a refresh of the widget.
• Fixed bug that didn’t allow negative latitude and longitude.

As allways I apreaciate all feedback I get here, so write away! I’m especially curious on how getting the location based on IP works. I have done some successfull testing on IP’s from bigger cities in Norway and abroad. But I would love to get some feedback on how it work for you!. Do it get the correct location and how small towns do it manage to collect. Also if you live outside a town, what do it find?

There are still some possible errors not fixed, reported in the last version. Somtimes it do not refresh the main window. It might be related to loosing internet connection but it have not been confirmed yet. Also there are some repports that the gadgets opens the flyout out of the screen instead of into the screen like it is suposed too. My suspicions are that this is related to Windows and gadgets in general and not this spesific gadget. If anyone are able to find a way to reproduce this or other usefull feedback please let me know.

Enjoy and have an excellent 17.May celebration!

A new version of the weather gadget is ready for download. Just download and double click the package and it should install over the older version. To check the version just check the settings page and the version is stated at the bottom (unless you have the 1.0.0 version).

• Possible to select hour by hour forecast instead of 9 day forecast as flyout. (requested by Steffan)
• Increased the timer used to check for new weather forecast. No need to check for new weather forecast every few seconds

Enjoy!

A new version of the weather widget is out with some updates based on the feedback I got from users on this blog and on mail.

• Now shows a moon instead of a sun when displaying the midnight weather.
• Fixed a bug that made it sometimes show the wrong current weather when minimized.
• If you write in your custom name for a location and press save the choice will be saved for later and show up in the auto completion search.
• Added version to the setup page to easy see what version is installed.
• When a new version is out you will be notified when entering setup.

I had to create a new name of the .gadget package that did not contain the version number for easy upgrade in the future, but if you have the old application installed you need to right click the sidebar and select “Add gadgets”. Then right click the old weather gadget and select “Uninstall”.

I created a weather report Windows Gadget with data from yr.no this summer and have been using it since then. I now decided that I would like to share this Gadget to others that might want to use it. The design is very simple since it was mean’t as private Gadget and I’m a programmer not a designer, but feel free to create a new design for me and I’ll include it in the application

For more information take a look at weather.larsolavtorvik.com. I used to have my old UWA widget at that address but I removed it for now, atleast temperarly. If you miss it feel free to tell me and I’ll share the code.

As I blogged earlier I wrote a small widget for the yr.no competition. I had limited time and ran into some issues on while developing it. You can read more about it here. So to my surprise I actually won one of the categories and recived my Asus Eee last week. Seems the competition was time well spend afterall, because now I have a new toy

Last week I saw a contest on yr.no. Create an application that uses their weather data. They gave away prices for 3 categories; web, desktop and mobile. I had a long time considered making a weather php lib so I decided to join.

First I created a general weather php lib that gathered the weather information from yr.no. Then I had to decide what application I wanted to make. I actually decided to make multiple small applications. One netvibes UWA widget, a facebook application and wordpress widget. I knew I had little time and the other competitors had 5 week head start on me but I wanted at least try.

I started on the UWA widget… and actually never got any time to start on the other applications. It was fun to work with UWA but it have some severe restrictions. To list a few.

• Not allowed with external css and js files. This was a major problem since I decided to use Google Maps to get the longitude and latitude needed of the weather api I had decided to use.
• According to netvibes it is not possible to create a auto completion text box in their preferences. Still think there should be possible to find a way to do it… but haven’t found one yet. If this was allowed I could have used it as way to select location instead of Google Maps. I really didn’t want to use the old fashioned post to get the location, it is just to boring!
• Since you can’t load external js file I was advised to use my Google Maps in an iframe. This would solcethe problem. The only problem was to send the values back from the iframe to the preferences. Since a UWA widget is automatically part of the netvibes.com domain but the iframe is on my domain. There is security restriction that won’t let you access the parent elements functions. This was a major hassle! Thanks to this article I found a solution using javascript and hashes. It work excellent in browsers like Firefox but there are some issues in browsers like IE7. You actually have to change the security settings in IE7 to make it work. And if that wasn’t enough it will not work at all on some browsers if my widget is inside another iframe and thats how netvibes.com add you widget to their page. So on some browsers it works fine in stand alone mode but you have to set the longitude and latitude manually on other browsers.
• The applications in UWA is supposed to automatically work on lots of other platforms like iGoggle, Windows Vista Gadget, Opera Widget, Yahoo Widgets, Mac and more. I have only tried it on iGoogle so far and it doesn’t work and I can’t see I get any error messages. A bit annoying but haven’t really had the time to debug and figure out what is wrong. I’m guessing since I have problems with iGoogle that is supposed to be one of the easier ones it will probably not work on the others either. I will have to try that some other day!

So these problems took way too much time and is the reason why I didn’t manage to create more application. Since I didn’t even manage to make the UWA widget work perfect in all browsers I don’t think I have any chance of winning. Not that my idea was that creative. Probably someone else that have created something better and more creative since they had 6 times as much time But it was fun to finally try and create an UWA application.

Take a look at my weather page on http://weather.larsolavtorvik.com/. Not the prettiest page but at least I have some more information there, including a download for the whole source code fort he project.