[bruing]

Title says it all! The motivation is that a new installation of XBMC on a bright, sunny California day shows a moon and the sub-zero temperature for New York. Everyone I've ever installed XBMC for has put up with it, instead of digging through settings and plugging in home addresses.

This can be fixed with a "prefered geolocation service" option. XBMC can enumerate the possible geolocation services, and fallback if the prefered one returns null. Or the user could set "prefered geolocation service" to manual, and continue as before.

I'll do some research and list services below. Any thoughts? I got dibs on coding the REST-based ones if this sounds like a good idea!

[jmarshall]

A patch would certainly be welcome.

[bruing]

<bear with me, i'm editing the list offline right now...>

[timdog82001]

Cell triangulation
Maybe when cell phones and netbooks are fast enough to run XBMC...

This is an aside, but for the record, xbmc works beautifully on my netbook acer aspire one with only 1 gb of ram (that's using xbmc live, not as smooth in windows/full linux installs, but still not bad). My netbook is about the cheapest one I could find when I bought it about a year ago, so I imagine most newish netbooks could run xbmc just fine.

Anyway, sounds like a very good feature, especially for reducing setup issues for the not-so tech-savy. Would be cool, too, if it were checked each time xbmc started (this may be what you had in mind anyway), so if you have it on your laptop or other portable device, it could display the weather for where you are right then, without the need for you to figure out your local zip code when travelling and go in and change settings and the whole shebang.

[bruing]

...when travelling...

Sony's working on a technology that uses info about visible wifi stations and a local, offline database. They carried a portable wifi device on a train in Tokyo, taking readouts every 10 seconds, and were able to generate the map below. It's not a new idea; Google's been working on a similar system, if you remember the wifi privacy snafu from earlier this year. This tech would bode well for the people who've thought about using xbmc for "carputers" and such.

[bruing]

I finished writing the framework. Similar to the Weather Infoloader, it creates a global "Location Infoloader" that dispatches "Location Jobs" to the job queue. The base Location Job is a partially abstract class, mostly for code reuse, and is meant to be extended into different types of location-determining child classes that override the DoWork function. The CLocation infoloader is also easily maintainable because it doesn't change a whole lot from jmarshall's implementation of CWeather (also makes it less likely for me to screw something up )

I need some help figuring out how to incorporate this into XBMC. It's a small paradigm shift from the current behavior of specifying 3 locations. I think that most people care more about what's happening over the next three days rather than over three disparate locations. Should XBMC default to just a single auto-determining location? maybe with an option to override the geolocation method (this can even be auto-determined) and to enter a manual location? Another option should be add another location, so the user can optionally add as many locations as they want. This simplifies the experience for first-time users, and retains functionailty for powerusers.

I don't know if this is the best path, or how welcoming xbmc is to small paradigm shifts like this one. Any suggestions?

[timdog82001]

Sony's working on a technology that uses info about visible wifi stations and a local, offline database. They carried a portable wifi device on a train in Tokyo, taking readouts every 10 seconds, and were able to generate the map below. It's not a new idea; Google's been working on a similar system, if you remember the wifi privacy snafu from earlier this year. This tech would bode well for the people who've thought about using xbmc for "carputers" and such.

Well when I said traveling I just meant away from home, not a tracing your route sort of thing. But that would be cool too, though I wouldn't personally have a use for it.

[bruing]

Haha just brainstorming. If it gets me not having to configure the weather 100 more times the I'll be happy

[timdog82001]

I finished writing the framework. Similar to the Weather Infoloader, it creates a global "Location Infoloader" that dispatches "Location Jobs" to the job queue. The base Location Job is a partially abstract class, mostly for code reuse, and is meant to be extended into different types of location-determining child classes that override the DoWork function. The CLocation infoloader is also easily maintainable because it doesn't change a whole lot from jmarshall's implementation of CWeather (also makes it less likely for me to screw something up )

I need some help figuring out how to incorporate this into XBMC. It's a small paradigm shift from the current behavior of specifying 3 locations. I think that most people care more about what's happening over the next three days rather than over three disparate locations. Should XBMC default to just a single auto-determining location? maybe with an option to override the geolocation method (this can even be auto-determined) and to enter a manual location? Another option should be add another location, so the user can optionally add as many locations as they want. This simplifies the experience for first-time users, and retains functionailty for powerusers.

I don't know if this is the best path, or how welcoming xbmc is to small paradigm shifts like this one. Any suggestions?

What is the status on this? Have you made any more progress? And I think I somehow missed this post before, but my 2 cents is that it should keep the basic functionality of having 3 weather locations, but one of them would be the dynamic weather "here," and the other two would be hardcoded remote locations that don't track your location.

[spiff]

try it yourself.. 101 (PR)

[garbear]

What is the status on this? Have you made any more progress? And I think I somehow missed this post before, but my 2 cents is that it should keep the basic functionality of having 3 weather locations, but one of them would be the dynamic weather "here," and the other two would be hardcoded remote locations that don't track your location.

I basically implemented your idea to the letter. Github just punched me in the face and ruined everything about the pull request. Stay tuned & i'll get another one up and working

[garbear]

I think i got it working. 128 (PR). if you can, try pulling from https://github.com/garbear/xbmc (tree SmartWeather2)

[timdog82001]

Awesome, great work. I'll give it a shot when I'm through midterms and actually have a spare second to take a look

[garbear]

If you like midterms so much u should fly down on thurs and take a thermodynamics one for me so I can keep doing these xbmc features ;-)

[timdog82001]

I'll trade you for cellular/molecular/developmental biology. The sad thing is I used to be really good at this stuff, I took like a year of it but that was in 2002 and I've all but forgotten it all and I have no time to actually study for this class