Re: Location and weather data.

[Marco Cawthorne]

On 2023-09-28 15:27:18 -0700 Paulo Delgado <paulo@paulodelgado.com> 
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm learning ObjC/GNUstep and decided to write a weather app as my 
> starter 
> project (https://github.com/paulodelgado/Weather.app). Initially I 
> was 
> pulling data from "WeatherApi.com" but I realized this wont be 
> sustainable as 
> because of the pricing limitations of each access token.
>
> I went out to see how other open source apps gather weather data and 
> in doing 
> so I checked out the GNOME weather app and found out there's a 
> library called 
> "libgweather" (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libgweather).
>
> Is there something similar in GNUstep? If not, would it be a good 
> idea to 
> write a clone of this library specifically for use of other GNUstep 
> apps?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paulo Delgado

Hello Paulo, there's been apps that have queried weather sources such
as NOAA's National Weather Service without an API in the past. For
example, wmweather asks you to provide the weather station identifier
(such as EDDB, for Berlin) and you can get a METAR report via plain
text here:

https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/EDDB.TXT

That should be trivial to parse to not need a dedicated library,
if you're aiming for minimalism anyway. However a dedicated library
that uses that info, localizes it and exposes a very Cocoa-like API
does sound like a useful project!

-- Marco