IPhone Weather Widget updated

The latest version of the Belgian Weather Forecast Widget for iPhone users still is a standards based web application with lots of JavaScripts and css tweaks but it's getting hard to tell the difference between this application and a proprietary iPhone application. iPhone users just have to open Mobile Safari and browse to this url. (This widget exists also for PC or Mac)

Respect!

Great news coming from ...

We got the permission to freely use the data that gets published on this website and to convert it for usage inside the meteo widget.

RESPECT!

Meteo widget updated

As predicted just a few days ago, it didn't take that long before the meteo widget stumbled once again over the structure of the new version of the BDB website.
The problems stem from the fact that the weather forecast is displayed in an "html table" that is apparently getting manually updated so suddenly new rows appear while others disappear. This means we have to seek for some form of structure, especially for the possible derogations to the structure, so that an automated process can be successful in converting this unstructured data into a fixed xml format.
This is a process of trial and error. The result of this self-learning process is that after each failure, the application will become a little smarter and therefore more stable.

New version of the BDB website!

A new version of the BDB website was put online last weekend.
Of course, all of a sudden all my meteo widgets did not function anymore as they are dependent of the data published on BDB website. Therefore, I worked as a mad man this morning to get the widgets up and running again. Now, everything seems fine again but it is very possible that we will get some extra outages during the week as the BDB continuously seems to make some extra modifications. The widget's data parser is based on the data as it is published now on the BDB website but as soon as rare or extreme weather conditions force the BDB to display their data differently, I will have to catch these exceptions and try to handle them nicely, preferably by displaying this extra info in the widget.

Belgian Weather Forecast for iPhones

An "iPhone-like" webpage was generated out of the 'Belgian Weather Forecast' widget that is now available as a kind of online application for iPhone users. The conversion went surprisingly well mainly due to the fact that the widget is merely a simple webpage that is built up by some JavaScript function executions and the injection of remote data that is being fetched from a server with some Asynchronous HTTP requests. And since the mobile version of the Safari webbrowser fully supports this technology the main source part of widget could simply be reused. De widget's style was slightly adapted, mainly with better(bigger) fonts which should improve the readability on iPhones. Extra info and scripts, were found on the website of Joe Hewitt's fantastic IUI project. This lib also contains some scripts that could make the widget even more iPhone-like by make the transitions from a previus to a next forecast by the use of horizontal sliding. iPhone users go here for testing