Re: A weather app for GNOME

[Andrew Potter <agpotter gmail com>]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 2:14 AM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Giovanni Campagna
>> As a quick afternoon hack, I built a Weather app, following the
>> designs at https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Weather, and I think it
>> would make a reasonably good Core App.
>
> I don't see much actual design work on the page [1] for that app...
> did you speak to one of the other designers about this? If you didn't,
> I'd suggest that you do. We want the new apps to have consistent
> designs.

If one or more of the designers want to give their attention to
weather in GNOME, I'd love to be a part of the discussion. I'm
interested in providing an interface for users to view Common Alerting
Protocol (CAP) [2] messages. The majority of the CAP messages produced
today are weather-related phenomenon, such as floods, tornadoes,
hurricanes, etc, but they are structured to also be used in an
emergency situation such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, civil
disturbances, etc. I've been playing around with extracting the data
from these at [3] in pygtk and gtkmm. If you want to check out some of
what we can show users, check out the app in the python directory (the
gtkmm version has much of the same functionality, but isn't hooked up
to a message source atm). Google has a webapp at [4] but only shows
the basic components of the messages; there are a number of
interesting details that could be extracted (such as tornado funnel
bearing and speed, or more specific information on flood crest times,
etc)

The challenge with CAP messages is getting them: it is an OASIS
format, but is mostly only used in the US and maybe Canada. Right now,
most feeds are on a State-by-state level in the US, although by summer
there may be a national RSS feed available. That said, I think it is
an important functionality to bring to GNOME users in the US, and
there is strong potential that other countries may pick up the
standard.

[2] http://www.incident.com/cookbook/index.php/Welcome_to_the_CAP_Cookbook
[3] https://github.com/talisein/Stormee
[4] http://google.org/publicalerts