Outdoor Discoveries

What originally was a news section for the rest of the website soon became a place for me to write about human-powered wanderings in the countryside. Photography inspires me to get out there, mostly on foot these days, though cycling got me started. Musings on the wider context of outdoor activity complete the picture, so I hope that there is something of interest in all that you find here. Thank you for coming!

ForecastFox

11th November 2006

While taking a look around the new Accuweather UK and Ireland website, I spotted a mention of this useful Firefox plug-in (or add-on). Having had Firefox since the first betas and now using it as my main browser, I decided to investigate further. While not an Accuweather development, ForecastFox does take Accuweather local forecast data and show it in the Firefox interface wherever you decide; personally, I keep in the browser status bar. Apparently, it started out life as WeatherFox, using Weather.com data, before the plug-in’s developers found the conditions placed by that provider to restrictive and looked elsewhere, finding Accuweather to be an welcoming partner. Intriguingly, Weather.com offers its own weather toolbar, for Internet Explorer!

To return to ForecastFox, a really feature is that you can set up multiple profiles and have a weather from different location on display in each profile, great for planning a weekend walking expedition. Nevertheless, this does have the disadvantage that settings are associated with the profiles and you cannot cascade things from a global setting. For instance, if you want to see 7 days weather (although I suspect that 15 is the limit, you can have as many days as your screen allows) for any location, you have to go into each profile and change its display settings as appropriate. Having the ability to have a single profile and change the locations would be a bonus. Also, you cannot have temperature in Celsius and wind speed in miles per hour: you have to have metres per second instead and my comprehension of Fahrenheit (with which you do get mph) is ropey to say the least. These may be areas for improvement but ForecastFox remains a very useful gizmo.

Comment:

  • John says:

    There seems to be a incompatibility between Firefox 2.0.0.1 and ForecastFox that has stopped my using it for the foreseeable future. If I disconnect from the Internet for while and reconnect, Firefox uses up 100% of the CPU while ForecastFox is trying to refresh itself. The only cure is to kill Firefox and disable the plug-in. It was a nifty utility so I will await a new version.

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