If you are deep in coding mode and cannot afford to turn your head or even your eyes to look through the window at outside to check the current weather… or if you are deep down below ground plumbing at your black hole farming machine and now preparing your way home and are unsure whether to put on a rain jacket or the sunglasses… what is there to help you? A widget on your computer telling you about the weather, right.
Plasma5 so far was missing the port of the weather widgets which were part of the Plasma Addons package with the older Plasma. While there are nice Plasma5 weather widgets on kde-apps.org (1, 2) I wanted the weather widget back I was used to.
Time for “Scratch your itch!”. Starting myself with no clue about Plasma dataengines and also about the new Plasma5 QML-centric widget technology, there was enough material to be found and samples to copy from to port the old weather widget code over to the new Plasma5 world. Also was there great support by the Plasma developers (special thanks to Kai-Uwe and Marco) who quickly helped out with questions, gave good review or the next day fixed bugs elsewhere I hit on the way.
This week there was the feature freeze for Plasma 5.6, and of course it would be nice to share this widget already with everybody again. Did we make it in time?
Teaser: Yes š
Seems its time for rain jacket in Geneva, while sunglasses are okay in Lisbon š
There is one bigger issue currently known: sometimes after configuring a new weatherstation to be used, there is no instant data update, so the widget will be blank. This blank widget should heal itself on the next weather report update interval (or on the next Plasma restart). Hopefully we soon find the reason to fix this.
There is still the Weatherstation widget left in Plasma Addons, waiting for a port as well (nothing I am interested in, so no itch to scratch here). Feel encouraged to give it a go to port it yourself and become the happy maintainer of a Plasma5 widget as well š
Attracted by virtual constructs 
Nice job! one thing i really missed.. thanky a lot!
will you keep on working on it? would be nice to have monochrome icons in there too to make it easily readable (the only thing i really hated about this waether widget.
however.. thanks for you work again š
At least I plan to maintain it a little, yes, there are some glitches I still would like to see improved.
For the icons, I expect the breeze icon maintainers to already swing their knives to cut monochrome ones if they have seen the current. If not yet, they will be soon invited to do that, yes š
Glad to see another person welcoming the widget, thanks for telling.
Hi
Awesome that you port the widget. You will get breeze icons š
You can also ask at the vdg mailing list
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Weather+Widget?content=169572
Works fine
Hi,
any chance to add support weather data from the open data initiatives ?
data gov will allow download only http[s] or ftp[s] url with a predefined schma. in some operators the content will be in zip file others xml or csv formats.
working examples:
live values (with i18n) : https://ims.data.gov.il/sites/default/files/xml/imslasthour.xml
live values Azure (MET-UK) format : https://data.gov.uk/dataset/metoffice_uklocs3hr_fc
forecast (ECMWF format ) : http://www.ims.gov.il/ims/PublicXML/IMS_001.xml
WMO format : http://www.ims.gov.il/ims/PublicXML/observ.xml
Yes, there is a chance: the weather widget uses the data it gets from the weather dataengine which is part of the plasma-workspace repo (so part of a default Plasma5 installation). And that dataengine uses a plugin system to adapt to all different kind of weather services. There is a public interface for that. I have already started to write a blog post about it, calling for further plugins for the weather dataenginge, but so far I wanted to wait until Plasma 5.6 is released and so more people also might be able to have it installed, so more people can be addressed than those able to run Plasma5 from the development version š
See here for the current plugins that adapt to existing weather data services on the internet:
https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=plasma-workspace.git&a=tree&f=dataengines%2Fweather%2Fions
You can see three working (wetter.com, envcan, noaa) and one broken (bbcukmet, their service API got removed or somehow changed) currently (and part of Plasma 5.6).
The links you gave sound very good, it would be great to have people write a few ion plugins that each connects to one of them (cannot promise myself something here).
The problem to solve is nicely separated into a small plugin per service, perhaps you want to give it yourself a try! Ask for support on #plasma on irc š
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