5 day forecast?

Archive Weather Display Feature Suggestions
1

It would be a neat feature if you could parse the downloaded zone data and create an image that showed the 5 day forecast… using the icons associated for the weather in that data already in WD…

I think Hamweather does this…

Here is what my current zone report looks like…

MORNING…THEN SHOWERS WITH A SLIGHT CHANCE OF THUNDERSTORMS IN THE
AFTERNOON. COOL…WITH HIGHS IN THE LOWER TO MID 50S.
.TONIGHT…MOSTLY CLOUDY. CHANCE OF RAIN SHOWERS. LOWS IN THE
UPPER 30S TO MID 40S. CHANCE OF RAIN 40 PERCENT.
.WEDNESDAY…PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGHS IN THE 50S.
.WEDNESDAY NIGHT…MOSTLY CLOUDY. LOWS IN THE MID 30S TO LOWER 40S.

I imagine you could parse by the ‘.’ and create an icon that showed the correct icon, ‘mostly cloudy’ for example, and perhaps the temps forecasted…

It looks like these are written in a standard notation, so it shouldn’t be too hard to parse… (easy for me to say!!)

Just another thing for my wishlist, along with the selectable METAR usage for Summary data/icon creation…

Thanks everyone!

2

You could use ImageSalsa for this, there is already a script available that achieves exactly this idea. See Demos 3 and 4 at http://www.imagesalsa.com/demos.htm

3

Yech! What a terrible name for a software utility. Did you see the price for that thing?! $20 - $50 !!! Geesh, all for a 5 day forecast? Or generating a bit of html with a few images? I don’t get it.

4

I don’t think you understood what the product really is. Its a dynamic image manipulation software that can do photoshop type manipulation but automatically evry second if need be!

5

You wouldn’t happen to sell it would you?

That thing is NOTHING like Photoshop.

Tom

6

We do have it for sale yes, but thats not why I was suggesting it.

Rutat, have you actually tried it? It has amazing dynamic graphic manipulation capability, Brian thinks so too! The author spent a lot of time developing it.

However, if you don’t like it then thats your choice, I was only suggesting it as an option. Its just nice to be able to do multiple dynamic graphics so easily thats all! :smiley:

7

I’ve heard good thing about Image Salsa. It’s on my wanted list when I have a few other things sorted.

Bob

8

isn’t this an ambient product from Virtual Weather Station?

9

No I don;t think it is. Ambient are exclusive distributors of the product and Image Salsa has worked in cooperation with Ambient which makes them a separate entity. There is a weather version of the software that supports Ambients software. It may also support WD with a change in the script.

Nevertheless, the results that this software preoduces are pretty cool!!

Check our http://www.imagesalsa.com/index2.htm

Bob

(I am in no way associated with Image Salsa or Ambient. The above statement is only my opinion. rf)

10

HMMMM, interesting this Image Salsa is…

Time for a new thread!

11

Yeah, I tired it. Lasted even less time that Ambient’s software.

WTF is the big attraction with webcam image manipulation?

And as for its value - forget it. PSP is only a few bucks more and it is easily 10 times the package. GIMP is free and it is orders of magnitude better.

Plus if you want to RYO… get Dorgem and do some scripting.

I guess I just have a thing about vendors serriptiously pushing the producst they sell like the Second Coming. My bad…

Tom

12

Alright, I gotta get involved! I usually just hover, but, I would like to shed some light on IS.

First off, this software can do quite a bit more than anybody seems to think. I beta tested this software long before it officially came out, and it has made it a LONG WAYS from just plain old Paint Shop Pro or Web Cam software. Here’s a list of things I use this software for:

  1. Live, Streaming Web Cam
  2. A forecast creator just like on the NOAA/NWS Sites
  3. A radar collector (downloads images from the net and saves them at intervals I want them to be saved as)
  4. Consistently updated image cropper. Okay, so, yes, I am a VWS user, I don’t necessarily like my current weather image having the temperature and border, so I use IS to crop the image to what I want to see and it updates automatically for me.
  5. I will take VWS information and create a simple one line of text with, say, Wind Direction, Speed and Gusts and have it constantly update. Then, I take it into my weather web site and insert inline frames, posting the image that has been saved and have it stream so that people visiting the site can watch the wind speeds and directions in real time. I also do this with the temperature, dew point and humidity.

You can check out the real time data at http://www.koaxweather.info. I also will have the forecast up there, too.

I hope this helps some of you realize what this software can do.

-Nat

13

Since I left vws, I haven’t heard much from you as I don’t visit the forum. Does Imagesalsa work independently of vws or is it an add-in. I still want to use WeatherDisplay as it gives me more things that I use that vws doesn’t.

so to invest in a side program, how does it compare with use of resources, is it an add-in or a stand-alone.

Nice to see you vws people checking in to our side of the globe. I have a great ISU/Nebraska gif to send ( ok, nice from the isu standpoint) .

14

I don’t want to upset anyone, but as I recall, someone put a Wdisplay ad a way back on the VWS forum and just about everyone and their grandmother came down on Brian big time. Accusing him of this and that.

Here I am seeing that people who use vws are posting here trying to have us abandon Wdisplay and use their products. Now I know NAT exists as a separate person and lives in Nebraska ( not the end of the universe, but you can see it from there) , so this is not a mystery person.

So, If Brian comes up with the ultimate weather solution ( includes starting the car and the AM coffee, world peace and weather control) and I use my password (I have it here, somewhere) to their forum, I shouldn’t have any problems doing that???

Seems a tad strange to this person. :roll:

15

I’m confused. You stated all these thing Image Salsa can do then you directed me to a web page with a bit of dynamic HTML in it. How does this page relate to Image Salsa? Was the page generated using IS? Please enlighten me?

16

Perhaps I can help here. There are three versions of ImageSalsa, all of them ARE standalone and each offers more levels of complexity. The largest version can retrieve weather data from VWS, but I think Brian said some time ago that he could duplicate the file format it uses so you could use WD to provide the data IF he can do this AND wants to!

Rupp, the images on the demo page are created from within ImageSalsa, they are simply jpegs that the program has composed not dynamic html.

Here’s another idea of how it can be used. In the UK we are very limited on the availability of rain radar images. So what I wanted was my own composite image of cloud cover with rain radar superimposed on top of it. This isn’t available as far as I know from any site, so this is how I did it.

I took this basic image and cropped and resized it on level0 of WeatherVision. This would be my base background.

I then grabbed this cloud cover image and removed the blue bits with transparency. I don’t like the fact that the thicker cloud is whiter in this image so I used WeatherVision to invert the grayscale so these thicker clouds became dark and the thinner ones light. Then I added this image over the base image making the clear air transparent.

Then I grabbed the rain radar image that is available to us Brits.

This is quite a complex image as far as colours are concerned but once more using the multiple colour transparencies available in WeatherVision, I removed the sea, the logo, the land etc leaving me with just the rain radar data.

This image was then added over the cloud image, a few text objects added to give some information and there it is!

The program does this automatically every 10 minutes and that is the magic of it, totally dynamic! The whole process to set this up took about 15 minutes and I’m sure with a little more time it could be improved upon but at least it shows what can be done.

Does that help explain a bit more about what it can do? As you see, there is not a sign of VWS in there :smiley:

17

So once you set up the “macros?” you can simply redo them at certain intervals? This is neat. Thanks for the information.

18

Or just use a precompiled image from http://www.meto.gov.uk
Do a metatag refresh and you are good to go.

For US users, use Nexrad which already has this feature (outlines)

Tom

19

ImageSalsa’a home page is not the best ad for the product. That Swiss (?) fellow (Berube?) has a neat page IMHO. And I’m more a fan of pages like www.wx.ca

I’m not sure that the KOAX site is a better example. Took FOREVER to load - and I have an OC3 (16 megabit burst!!) line. I can’t even imagine it on dial-up.

And I think that was one of the main reasons I rejected it (other than feature bloat) - takes way too much telco throughput to get anything from ImageSalsa onto the Net.

If I desired to do anything like what IS does, I’'ll do it server-side in JS. YMMV

Tom

20

Rutat,

I agree with your comments in general. However, there are many amateur weather watchers out there that are more interested in the weather than computers and programming and either have no time or interest in script or extensive programming. Products like Image Salsa help such people to construct a half decent web site with image and graphics overlays.

Don’t get me wrong, Brian has a great program in WD and the production of a generated web page is fantastic. But there are people that want a bit of individuality and creativity on their pages but do not have the technical ability to achieve it.

Bob