Local Weather PocketMod
30 Oct 2006
I had a break-though in my Pocketmod ( PocketMod is a standalone flash player) module programming experiments. I have away to have user customized mods. Here is my first one in the series. Weather forecast, download the swf and modify your xml. Here are the rules:
- The label in the xml must be “Weather”
- You can only have one copy at a time, it will use the last one in the list
- Rename the swf to zipcode of the forecast you want.
Hopefully the next version of wordpress will allow me to post xml snippets better.
It’s a little large for a pocketmod, because of the graphics and the fact the fonts are embedded (for print rotation).
I just stumbled on these PocketMod pages you’ve designed, and they’re really cool. But I can’t seem to get this weather one to work. I put the .swf file in the “root” mods folder (i.e. the mods folder that holds the blank, cover, cover_customize and template files in the initial installization). I initially renamed the .swf to my home zip code (which is out in the sticks a little), added the XML node to the mods.xml file, and saved. The Weather page shows in the PocketMods “Select a mod” list, but when I click it, the preview says “You did not rename your swf to your zip code” - though I did. I thought maybe my zip code was too remote, so I tried the zip code for Asheville, NC, the closest minor city, but with the same results. Finally, I tried reseting everything back to the original (Orlando?) zip code, and it still doesn’t work.
Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? If you’ve got any ideas what I might be doing wrong, I’d appreciate knowing what I can do to make this work.
Thanks again for the cool PocketMods.
Hi Scott,
It looks like you stumbled on to a bug. The easiest fix is to move the weather mod into a folder under the mods directory. For example “/mods/fairlyuseless/28801.swf”.
Then place this in your “mods.xml” file.
<folder label=”Fairly Useless” folder=”fairlyuseless” icon=”" isBranch=”true”>
<mod label=”Weather” desc=”Asheville Weather Forecast” url=”28801.swf”/>
</folder>
That should fix it for now. Also it will only use one weather mod at a time.
First of all, great mod. I use this one all the time.
I’ve found an interesting bug / side-effect.
1. Navigate to weather.com through IE and change the default unit to Metric.
2. Load the weather mod
3. The English/Metric values now are not calculated properly (Fahrenheit value displays Celsius)
Thanks again for the great mods.
Hi Joe,
I could not reproduce the bug on my Mac, but I can see what is happening. Weather.com, which is what I use for the weather xml by default returns “English” units. What I am surprised about is that a cookie from IE is affecting the xml feed in the standalone flash player.
In fact the wind speed should be wrong too. I went back and looked and I didn’t bother getting the metric values I just converted them from Fahrenheit to Celsius. I will see if I can recode it to be a little smarter.
It doesn’t work!!!! I have it in a subdirectory (\mods\custom\) and in my mods.xml
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@ helllpMEE!!
What zipcode are you using? Does it work on weather.com? Did you rename the swf?
You should have something like this in your mods.xml file.