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ASCII Art Weather

wttr.in

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The site is also unusable on mobile, because ASCII art unlike proper semantic HTML is not easily rescalable by the browser. And it's inaccessible by users relying on screen readers, ironically because of all the ASCII cruft. As web developers, we're used to "everyone" being the audience, but that's not the case here. As a stylized visual representation of the weather, it's fine. I dig it. Making sure something is ac…

Oh, I agree that this is really cool in terms of aesthetics. I'm pointing out that the grandparent's comment about this being minimalistic, and comparing it to real weather apps as being absurd. If you're building a toy project aimed solely at programmers on desktop, there's a lot of things you don't have to care about. Some of those things are exactly the 'bloat' the grandparent has been complaining about.

Fair 'nuff! Thanks for the clarification. (The other stuff isn't the only source of bloat--for example, weather sites as a category feel (on average)...um...spammy (can't think of a better word) to me when it comes to quantity and presentation of ads and "suggested content"--but I get ya.)

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#82
post #53

Neat idea! The social buttons on the bottom kinda ruin the aesthetic, though (at least for me).

I was thinking the same thing. If those were made in ASCII as well it would've been delightful.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#84
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just transmit the data necessary to convey your information What is that cruft at the bottom of the page? Also, I would prefer this as a CLI application, not as a webpage. Further it should have flags that make its output more friendly to further processing (e.g. grep). Otherwise, nicely done.

> Also, I would prefer this as a CLI application, not as a webpage. curl http://wttr.in/london Looks nice :)

Using curl removes the HTML tags? Nice feature (though a little obscure).

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#85
I wish it showed dewpoint. Almost all these weather apps never show dewpoint (or it's hidden away), but instead almost always show the relative humidity percentage which is useless and just takes up space.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#86
Made a small bash function for it. You can give the city as an argument and otherwise defaults to the env var $WEATHER_CITY and if that's not set, won't provide any city to the site which will result in the site guessing your location.

weather() {

    if [ "$1" ] ; then
        city=$1
    else
        city=$WEATHER_CITY
    fi

    curl http://wttr.in/$city

}

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#87
post #14

Nice! :) alias weather="wget -O - http://wttr.in/london -q"

Slight tweak watch --color "wget -O - http://wttr.in/Palmerston_North -q" Not that its going to need to update that much, its just, well it makes me feel like it's more accurate that way.

You might want to use wego[1] directly if you're interested in weather reports in your terminal, if the dependencies aren't an issue.

[1] https://github.com/schachmat/wego

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#88
Related, "Forecast Font" takes an interesting approach to this, using a webfont: http://forecastfont.iconvau.lt/

Because it uses css to overlay elements, the woff font itself can be just the required pieces, rather than all the combinations. The woff font is 4.6kb. Not as tiny as ascii art, but still pretty small.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#89
post #40

And the moon: http://wttr.in/Moon

The moon phase visualization takes arbitrary dates too: http://wttr.in/Moon@2016-Mar-23 For the forecast, it also appears you can append "?m" to the URL for metric units or "?u" for USCS units to override the default it uses based on your presumed location.

I was looking for that; surprised I didn't see it in the github page/docs anywhere. It's weird looking at London Weather with Imperial units.

Re: ASCII Art Weather

#90

What's impressed me about this is how much faster it is than Web pages or Android apps. Really: just transmit the data necessary to convey your information. Your app is in the way. wttr.in on Android using Termux is actually pretty awesome.

Ok why not get Lynx on your Android device?

the rule of of diminishing return applies.. at some point, the usability shortcoming of ascii interface out weights the payload penalty

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