WeatherRibbon v1.1.1

Release notes

This release names the weather in plain English. Nothing else on the ribbon has changed.

Weather symbols are named as a forecast says them

Fixed: resting the pointer on a weather symbol showed MET Norway's internal code, run together in lower case, such as "lightrainshowers day". It now shows an everyday name such as "Light showers", "Thundery showers" or "Heavy snow showers", the same words a screen reader reads out. Showers on their own are showers of rain; whether it is day or night is left to the icon, which draws the sun or the moon.

Fixed: the icon set spells light snow showers with thunder with a doubled s, so had MET Norway sent the correct spelling, the cell would have shown words in place of the icon. It now finds its icon whichever spelling arrives, as light sleet showers with thunder already did.

WeatherRibbon v1.1.0

Release notes

This release changes nothing on the ribbon itself: the cells, the settings and the menus are as they were. It fixes how WeatherRibbon behaves around the Dock on macOS and when the computer logs out, restarts or shuts down on macOS and Linux.

macOS

Fixed: WeatherRibbon no longer shows a Dock icon. It lives in the menu bar alone, where a click on its icon opens its menu.

Fixed: the Dock no longer adds WeatherRibbon to its recent apps. Before, a recents tile appeared in the Dock at every launch even though the running app had no Dock icon; the app now tells macOS from the start that it is a background app, so the Dock never records it.

Fixed: WeatherRibbon no longer interrupts a log out, restart or shut down. It now quits when macOS asks, where before it could stop a restart from going ahead.

Linux

Fixed: no black window at login. The Flatpak could show a large black window for a moment at login before the ribbon took its place; that early window is now kept invisible.

Fixed: restarting with WeatherRibbon running no longer hangs GNOME Shell. The ribbon now leaves as soon as the system announces a restart or shut down, before the desktop is taken down around it. Before, most restarts with the ribbons running hung the desktop; in the restarts measured since, none has.

To do this the Flatpak asks for one more permission: it may talk to logind, the system service that announces a restart or shut down. Where that is not available the ribbon carries on as before.

WeartherRibbon v1.0.0

Release notes

The first release

WeatherRibbon is a small frameless ribbon of weather for the cities you choose, horizontal or vertical, for Windows, macOS and Linux. Each cell shows the city's local time, the weather now, today's high, low and rain, then the three days after, so a glance answers what the weather is where your friends and family are.

The weather in each cell

The temperature and a weather symbol for the hour come from MET Norway's forecast. Today's high, low and rain cover the hours from now to midnight in that city, so late in the day they describe the hours left. Each of the next three days shows its weekday, a symbol and its high above its low. Every number says what it measures: 16°C, H 20°C L 14°C, 0.4 mm.

A click on a cell opens the next 24 hours for that city, each hour with its temperature, symbol, rain and wind, beside the city's sunrise and sunset.

Metric or Imperial

Metric is degrees Celsius, millimetres and kilometres an hour; Imperial is degrees Fahrenheit, inches and miles an hour. The choice applies at once to every cell.

Finding a city

The search runs over GeoNames' list of the 34,153 places of more than 15,000 people, built in, so typing never touches the network. Typing matches the start of a word of a place's name, region or country, larger places first. A label can be anything up to 32 characters.

Polite to MET Norway, careful offline

A forecast is asked for again ten seconds after MET Norway says it has expired, so MET Norway has its new forecast ready, carrying the date of the copy already held so an unchanged forecast is not sent twice; requests leave at least a second apart. The last forecasts are kept on disk, so the ribbon starts with them and keeps showing them with no network, saying how old they are once that passes two hours. A failed request is tried again after a wait that grows to two hours. If MET Norway refuses the application, nothing more is asked until the next launch; the ribbon says so.

A ribbon like TimeRibbon's

WeatherRibbon is built on ribbonkit, the library TimeRibbon shares, so it behaves as TimeRibbon does: it stays out of the way with no title bar or taskbar button, its icon in the notification area, menu bar or tray; it waits unpinned as a thin tab; it goes where you put it on any monitor and opens there next time; the corner grip resizes the cells from 75 to 200 percent and the Opacity slider fades the background while the weather stays solid; it comes in ten colour schemes, light, dark or the system's. Running beside TimeRibbon, neither ribbon ever lands on the other.

What it sends and what it does not do

Its network requests are the forecasts and sunrise times from MET Norway, sending each city's latitude and longitude rounded to four decimal places and a User-Agent naming WeatherRibbon, plus the update check to GitHub. It issues no weather warnings: rely on your national weather service for those.

Getting it

On Windows a setup program installs it for your account alone, with no administrator rights. On macOS a disk image signed and notarised by Apple; on Linux a Flatpak. The forecasts are MET Norway's and the city list GeoNames', both under CC BY 4.0; the weather symbols are MET Norway's Yr icons under MIT.

Now and then, after a long dry spell, a city may have a question for you.