Calendars and Weather
Now that I’ve spoken about obviousness I’ll mention something which I’m sure someone somewhere will tell me is obvious—and give an example of it being done. But, well, PalmOS doesn’t do it, iCal doesn’t do it, Evolution doesn’t do it, and I don’t remember Outlook doing it, so it’s not all that obvious. Regardless, the time I took to train myself to better remember my dreams has paid off with what I believe to be a decent idea yet again.
It’s a simple idea: Include the weather forecast in calendaring applications. iCal could make the day labels a little larger and have a little icon which shows the predicted weather conditions and temperature. You only need it for the next couple of days. For the current day you could even have hourly temperatures in there—or even better, the conditions for each scheduled event. iCal could even extend the idea to include location—if they add a zipcode field to “location” then they can pick up the weather forecast for that location during that time.
To me at least, it could be pretty nice. You will know at a glance what the weather is supposed to be like for events you’ve scheduled in to your calendar. It saves a lot of hassle of going to weather.com, putting in the correct location, and comparing it to the proper day. Computers can do all of that for us.
It’s kind of hard to describe exactly how I see it, but I think you get the picture. I’ll make a mockup sometime if someone really wants. I think it’d be very nice.
Now that you mention it - that is a really great idea (and you thought I was going to say ‘obvious’).
I’m surprised that services haven’t even gone half as far and offered vCal/iCal files with weather information in them, even if it was restricted to a subscription service.
http://www.project24.info/weather.php :-D
Just input your ZIP code (for the US) and it will have iCal subscribe to the appropriate calendar. It doesn’t have the icons, but it is a definite start.
Check out Weather in iCal. That might be part of what you are looking for.
That’s not quite what I’m describing, nor does it come close to achieving the kind of actual useful integration I’m talking about. This is all about being able to see the weather for a given event in a given location, not just subscribing to a weather forecast.
Although it is kind of cool to be able to do so.
Have you seen that rsscalendar.com provides a weather readout provided you pass it enough details on the location? At the moment it seems as though it’s always just returning the weather for today at the event location, but I’m not honestly sure.
I know this isn’t actually what you were talking about (you want client side support); is there actually a common way to pass weather information about? I know there’s Morten’s work on http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/ws/2003/05/weather/ but I don’t really see anything else.
Also, I think what FortranDragon had in mind was that the weather details aren’t included in the iCalendar files themselves, they’re handled by an external service like the one he links to.
iCal or Sunbird or whatever can then parse your event details to try and find a location you mention for the event and retrieve and display the appropriate weather forecast.
Except of course, that yet again, it only provides a single day’s forecast. Maybe someone could screenscrape the BBC weather pages or something?
I’m still not sure that you guys really get what I’m trying to say and that the real point here is one of design, not technical or feasibility issues.
Oh, sorry. Just prepend my responses with - “that would be a really good idea. Including a little weather icon would be really useful, I wonder how it could best be done?”
Ah well. :)
My major point was in the interface/interaction of how it works–for iCal it would take Apple actually adding it themselves, I think. Maybe I could make some mock-ups and suggest it to them and the Sunbird people. Getting the backend for it is easy; there are tons of services which offer weather feeds.
Great idea. Your idea came up in google’s results when I was searching to see if I could set up iCal to do this today!