porting liquid weather to plasma

[Matt and Sarah]

On Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:36:57 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 29 February 2008, Matt wrote:
> > I'm the guy who wrote (most of) liquid weather.
>
> cool =) liquid weather is one of my top 3 fave sk themes.

glad you like it.

>
> > Currently it's languishing
> > as a superkaramba theme, as I don't have a lot of time to maintain it,
> > and it's a complete kludgy mess.  I'd quite like to start from scratch
> > and rewrite it for plasma, but don't quite know where to start.
>
> hopefully we'll be able to help with that.
>
> > Basically, I only know python (and a very small subset of python at
> > that). I've read somewhere that someone's written a weather data engine,
> > but I don't know if it hooks into the weather.com xml feed.
>
> i don't think so, at least it isn't in the build i have. if you run
> plasmaengineexplorer and select the weather engine you'll see the "ions"
> list there (Shawn: should that be renamed to something less implementation
> revealing, such as "Weather Sources" or something?) ... i currently see
> NOAA, EnvCan and BBC's UK Met.
>
> i believe all of those also use XML feeds.

weather.com has info and forecasts for all countries, so is much more global 
than those others.

>
> > to parse than scraping websites.  However, it is subject to a license,
> > which I don't think is incompatible with plasma, however, maybe
> > incompatible with use as a generic data engine for other applets to hook
> > into.
>
> Shawn probably knows the details on this one. there's no reason it couldn't
> be provided as an optional plugin people could install, and we may even be
> able to be audacious enough to ship it ourselves but ... iirc it has a no
> commercial usage license? do you (or Shawn?) have a link to the licensing
> on it?

I don't anymore - if I recall correctly, it's free (as in beer) to use, 
provided that your application is free (as in beer) and contains a logo which 
links to their website somewhere.

>
> > If I'm to retain a lot of the functionality of liquidweather, I'd like to
> > also retain a lot of the configurability of it - I'm not sure what
> > facilities plasma provides for configuration dialogs, but hopefully it
> > can accommodate my needs.
>
> there are no constraints on these.

Good - can these be written in pyqt?  or is there a builtin config setup?
>
> > Is there a way to write plasma applets in python yet?  I know that plasma
>
> there is a Python ScriptEngine in playground. there are also javascript and
> webkit based ones.

I'll build a kde 4 svn environment in a vm, and then have a 'play'.

>
> > can, or will be able to, load superkaramba themes, however, as I say
> > above,
>
> yes, thanks to Sebastian's work it can load them since 4.0.
>
> > liquidweather is currently collapsing under its own weight, and I'd like
> > to start anew, and try to take advantage of some of the features of
> > plasma.
>
> makes sense...
>
> > Is there a website that can help to get me started?
>
> there's an overly neglected introductory tutorial on techbase.
>
> *gives you a stick* now beat me over the ehad with it about how stupid it
> is that this isn't documented yet and i'll get to it right away
>
> *beating ends*
>
> great. i'll try and make some quiet writing time this weekend.
>
> prior to that, however, there is the techbase tutorial and many, many
> applets in kdebase/workspace/plasma/applets, extragear/plasma/applets and
> playground/base/plasma/applets to look through. they are all c++ though. =/

I'll have a look on techbase - thanks.
>
> > Sorry, these quesetions
> > are probably answered somewhere, but I've been away from things for a
> > while, and am not fully up to speed with where things are at.
>
> np.. glad to see that you're back around ...



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