Introducing Weatherbot, a weather forecast application

[greystash]

Hello!

I've just built and released a new weather application for Mac OS and Windows. It runs on System 7 - Mac OS 10.11 El Capitan and Windows 98 - XP.
For those interested it was built with RealBasic and connects to Open-Meteo through a proxy server.

You can download it here, please let me know through the contact form on my website if you come across any bugs.

 

[chelseayr]

was about to go out when i noticed this, i think this is quite interesting and although i use weather.gc.ca website myself i probably won't had mind trying use something like this from the desktop instead too

btw its up to you but mind seeing what the system7today forum people would think of this too? as i'm sure they would say "one more app won't hurt especially if it really works on any 7.x too" you know?

 

[mg.man]

Hi, very cool... if only I could get it to work. I know you said to use your contact form...

...if you come across any bugs.

But I didn't see a way to upload an image. When loading, right after the main panel starts to build, I get this :

I'm running 7.1, a BSv2, I can ping www.intel.com (sorry, it's an easy one to test!) without issue. Any thoughts?

 

[mg.man]

Some progress... booted up 7.5.1 and no more crash, but now stuck "Looking Up Host..."

If you'll let me know what host it's looking for, I'll see if I can ping it.

 

[greystash]

was about to go out when i noticed this, i think this is quite interesting and although i use weather.gc.ca website myself i probably won't had mind trying use something like this from the desktop instead too

btw its up to you but mind seeing what the system7today forum people would think of this too? as i'm sure they would say "one more app won't hurt especially if it really works on any 7.x too" you know?

Thanks @chelseayr that's absolutely fine! It runs on System 7.5.1 ok but looks like anything lower may not work. I need to do some more testing

 

[greystash]

Some progress... booted up 7.5.1 and no more crash, but now stuck "Looking Up Host..."

If you'll let me know what host it's looking for, I'll see if I can ping it.

Thanks for trying it out @mg.man! I'm not sure what's causing the connectivity issues, I can get it running ok in 7.5.3. Any chance you could please send me some screenshots of the extensions and control panels you have enabled?

 

[mg.man]

Before diving into my extensions... saw your remark in your ChatGPT thread...

do you have a full installation of Open Transport?

I dont, just using MacTCP. If you're dependent on OT, that's probably the issue. I'll look into installing it - at least on my 7.5.1 partition. Will report back.

 

[mg.man]

Yup!... that was the problem.

 

[mg.man]

Neat app... it's a bit RAM hungry to just leave running ...

I see I need to register to get the 7-day - fair enough. Have you thought about making it a Control Strip module - with a 'live' icon that shows the general weather forecast (in the above case, a thunderstorm cloud) when loaded? Just ideas... great work!

 

[joshc]

it's a bit RAM hungry to just leave running ...

Probably because it’s a REALbasic app. I have nothing against REALbasic but creating small, memory efficient apps was never its forte. REALbasic relied a lot on its own interpretation of Toolbox stuff rather than calling the Toolbox directly iirc, also add to the fact the application will have 68k and PPC code in it, which will affect the app binary size as well. I remember these were all common criticisms of it back when it was a popular dev tool.

I think a Control Strip module would be pretty difficult to do with REALbasic - I don’t recall anything built-in for it.

 

[mg.man]

Probably because it’s a REALbasic app.

Ah, yeah, good point. Even so... useful exercise to get my PB 180c online and doing something "modern" - over WiFi even!!

 

[greystash]

@mg.man glad to hear you got it working! It is a shame RealBasic apps are a bit inefficient, however although it's still not ideal you can drop the memory requirements down to 2400k and it will run fine. I'll update that with the next release. A control strip item would be fantastic, I'm not sure how feasible it would be though as joshc mentioned. Maybe when I get more time I'll re-write it in something else

 

[joshc]

@greystash out of interest, which version of REALbasic are you using and what’s the host OS for your dev environment? Native machine or doing it in Basilisk?

 

[Byte Knight]

Registered - thanks for building this! Although I'm a little bummed that vintage Mac users no longer have to visit my BBS for their local weather forecast. Oh well, there's still national news & sports headlines to be viewed...

 

[greystash]

@greystash out of interest, which version of REALbasic are you using and what’s the host OS for your dev environment? Native machine or doing it in Basilisk?

@joshc I use RealBasic 3.5.2 for 68k compilation, RealBasic 5.5.2 for PPC OS9 and under compilation, RealBasic 2007 R3 for the Universal Binary and Windows compilation. It can be a little tricky getting things working in a way where the app runs under all three versions and isn't cumbersome to maintain.

I do the majority of development on my PowerBook G4 Ti under OS9, and test other systems on my MacBook Pro with SheepShaver and El Capitan.

 

[greystash]

Registered - thanks for building this! Although I'm a little bummed that vintage Mac users no longer have to visit my BBS for their local weather forecast. Oh well, there's still national news & sports headlines to be viewed...

Thanks @Byte Knight! I don't think you'll have to worry about that, it is a little heavy for 68k machines

 

[chelseayr]

not tried this software yet but the only one optional thing I'm maybe curious about would be humidity?

I mean i know this would 'break' the 4x2 layout you currently have but hmm yeah

 

[greystash]

@chelseayr I'll look at adding that in the next release

 

[CC_333]

This is fun!

I remember there was an Aladdin Systems product that did something similar back in the 90s. I can't remember what it was called, though.

Probably because it’s a REALbasic app. I have nothing against REALbasic but creating small, memory efficient apps was never its forte. REALbasic relied a lot on its own interpretation of Toolbox stuff rather than calling the Toolbox directly iirc, also add to the fact the application will have 68k and PPC code in it, which will affect the app binary size as well. I remember these were all common criticisms of it back when it was a popular dev tool.

Perhaps this can be a good proof of concept, and then in the future it can be re-implemented using a more resource-efficient language (doing so would likely have the side benefit of allowing it to run on earlier 68k Macs, such as the Plus, SE, Classic, which are too slow and lack enough RAM to support the current, REALBasic version).

c