Tag: weather

No more weather in DIN Time for Pebble

Yahoo has recently announced it will stop providing its weather data as a free service. This will eventually result in weather in DIN Time for Pebbles to stop displaying.

Since the Pebble platform, in my view, has no future and other weather providers are either costly or doesn’t provide the necessary data this can be seen as the final nail in the coffin for DIN Time for Pebbles.

Enjoy the weather while it lasts. You can still continue to use DIN Time without weather data in the future by disabling weather it in the settings.

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DIN Time 2.50 released with support for Forecast.io

DIN Time 2.50 is available now, and it finally allows for Forecast.io as an alternate weather provider. For this to work you need to register for a free personal API key on Forecast.io. Forecast.io will be a more accurate option for a lot of users, but requires the extra step of entering the API key in the settings page.

This version has also been optimized to reduce memory usage, in preparation for the next version, which will to add more weather and health data.

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Yahoo changes its mind and celsius is working again

It looks like Yahoo decided to revert back to how its weather API worked before yesterdays change, but they broke something doing so. Temperature was only reported in Fahrenheit. A fix is out now for DIN Time, version 2.47, which converts the Fahrenheit reading to Celsius. We’re back to normal for a few weeks I guess, until Yahoo tries to do something again.

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DIN Time weather not updating, again

Yahoo has made a major change to how their weather API works, so DIN Time (and probably many other watch faces and apps) can’t update the weather data. I’m looking into what can be made to get it up and running again.

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DIN Time 2.46 improves geolocation usage

DIN Time 2.46 includes improvements and changes to help ensure an uninterrupted geolocation service. DIN Time is too popular for its own good. With the large amount of DIN Time users we’re making too many geolocation requests per hour and risk blocking from Nominatim, the free geolocation service I’m using. DIN Time will now detect if you are in the same location as the last time the weather updated. If so, no new geolocation request is sent. Please note: If this change isn’t enough I will also need to limit the update frequency to every 60 minutes in the next version.
Also, another change in this version is if the GPS isn’t available and no woeid is entered, DIN Time will now use the location of the last successful weather update.

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DIN Time 2.45 fixes weather update issue

Version 2.45 of DIN Time fixes an issue with geolocation which caused the weather updates to fail if using GPS. Available now.

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DIN Time 2.44 released

DIN Time 2.44 is now available with a fix for the geolocation issue! Thank you Freakified, author of the TimeStyle watch face for the solution!

Pebble users that are still using pre-timeline firmware unfortunately can’t enjoy this update. You’re stuck using a woeid. Or just update your watch.

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Yahoo weather problems in DIN Time

Once again there are problems on Yahoo’s end (their geolocation service) when getting weather data if you use the GPS to select the weather location in DIN Time. The solution for now is to visit woeid.rosselliot.co.nz and find a woied for your location. Enter it in the weather settings popup (don’t tap the Get button!), save and you should start seeing updated weather again.

So, what about adding other weather providers?

It’s on my todo list, but it won’t happen now. Sorry.

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DIN Time weather update problems

There are currently ongoing problems with the weather data provided by Yahoo for the DIN Time watch face for Pebble Smartwatches.

This is not an error in DIN Time. For most users and locations the data sent by Yahoo often is several days old, sometimes up to 15 days! Only about 1 in 5 weather update requests contain the latest weather data and will be displayed in DIN Time. I have done some changes in version 2.33, released on November 23, to handle the issue better. Once DIN Time has gotten an up-to-date weather report it will save it for up to six hours, or until a newer one is available. If DIN Time hasn’t been able to download any new data for six hours “OLD DA/TA”, along with question marks instead of weather icons, will be displayed. Weather checks will continue to be done and eventually new data will hopefully be available.

I do not have any information about when Yahoo might resolve this issue, if ever. They seem to be aware of it however. I encourage you to visit this page and vote for the issue, which may speed up the process.

Why Yahoo?

Yahoo has unfortunately been the only practical free option for weather data with the amount of users DIN Time has. It is also quite accurate for most locations. Other weather providers would be very costly, or does not provide the kind of data or location service needed for DIN Time. I previously used Openweathermap.org and I got a lot of complaints about its accuracy. They have very good data for some location, but really poor for some.

What about Weather Underground, forecast.io, yr.no…?

Some weather providers let’s users register for free API keys, which theoretically could be entered by the user in weather applications like DIN Time. While this is useful and definitely something I consider I must also provide a weather service that works “out of the box” without forcing the users to register at another site.

Yr.no has been a popular suggestion lately. Unfortunately they don’t support geolocation through their API, which means it’s not possible for the Pebble app to send the user’s location in coordinates and get the weather for that location in return. You need to submit a valid location name and this isn’t practical.

I sincerely hope this issue will be resolved soon. If not, I will of course consider other options.

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