Last week I spent some time hooking Plak into weather information supplied by weather.co.za. I wasn’t entirely happy with the way things were working, or the level of South African coverage provided by weather.co.za. So, on Saturday, I unhooked Plak from weather.co.za, and hooked it into the weather services provided by Weather Underground.
Weather Underground provide a simple API for accessing international weather information, and their level of coverage for South Africa, while still incomplete, is much better than that provided by weather.co.za.
Weather icons displayed on the Plak map will now give an actual indication of the weather conditions at a particular location. If the data only contains temperature information for a location, an information icon is displayed.
Because Weather Underground provide information for many more locations in South Africa than weather.co.za does, I’ve also made the weather information dynamic. i.e. Every time the map is moved or zoomed, Plak re-queries the Weather Underground data, and at higher zoom levels, more weather locations are displayed.
Clicking a weather icon on the Plak map will now display a weather information popup that looks something like this: -
All I now need to do is work out when sunrise and sunset is, so that at night a moon icon is used to indicate clear or partly cloudy conditions.