Special thanks to Martin Conroy for his exceptional work, moral support, and for leading the way.

Thanks to everyone who's posted comments on my objects, for their positive feedback and support, which is much appreciated.  Thanks also to those people who have assisted with debugging issues in LookingGlass and the Sat/Radar.

Because DesktopX optimizes animation for speed at the expense of memory usage, the memory footprint of LookingGlass is pretty big because it is so rich in animation. However, once it's loaded and running, CPU load is very low.  The situation can be improved though: For best performance, turn on Dynamic Bitmap Caching:
Use Regedit and set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Stardock\DesktopX\DynBitmapCaching=1 

NOTE: Weather.com currently ONLY provides the human-written narrative forecasts with temperatures in Fahrenheit.  If you which to use Celcius/Centigrade, LookingGlass will display everything else in Celcius, but the narratives will still be in Fahrenheit.  If you don't like this, please complain to weather.com, not me.  If anyone would like to write an algorithm which will read arbitrary human-written text and perfectly convert the appropriate numbers from F to C, while NOT mangling other unitless numbers (like time, windspeed, humidity, etc) and accurately transposing terms like "the mid 50s" then by all means please contact me.

If anyone needs assistance with integrating Layered Weather Effects or any of the other advanced features in LookingGlass into their own weather objects for publication, I'd be happy to advise.

=====================================README===================================

A brand-new version of LookingGlass Weather!

The most advanced weather object gets even better. I wanted to create something that would take weather objects beyond where they've been before, so I've continued that theme by adding an array of new features, some available nowhere else.

NEW FEATURES:
--Hourly Forecasts: Displays the hour-by-hour detailed forecast for the next 12 hours. 
--Narrative Forecasts: Provides easy to read, plain-English forecasts for each day.
--Severe Weather Alerts: Provides you with the full text of any alerts for your area from the National Weather Service, including multiple alerts.

--The background image feature is now webcam compatible with an update timer... You can use any internet accessible image or webcam as the background.
--Added a dialog for changing the text color and background image (with file browser!)
--Added ability to specifiy location by name... no more looking up codes!
--Added automatic Southern Hemisphere detection for MoonPhase display (see README)
--Improved resize animation and made it easier for the user to replace the frame
--State transition issues eliminated


FEATURES: 
--Fully Animated Moon Phase indication! See the photo-realistic moon revolve on its axis, while shadowed as it would appear in the sky each night. 
--Both Extended Forecast and Compact mode, with animated transition 
--All weather conditions fully animated. Watch for lightning strikes! 
--Displays both Day and Evening forecasts in the extended forecast 
--All the extended forecast display are also fully animated, and include the moon phase 
--Improved accuracy of forecast interpretation with "Layered Weather Effects" 
--Drag and Drop an image file onto the background to give your weather forecast a background screen! Works well for skinning, too. 
--And much more! See the Credits file for details. 

Satellite and Radar Features: 
---Several types of Animated Satellite Imagery: 
Visible, Infrared, Radar, and IR+Radar Composite 
---Improved ground-based radar animated imagery 
--Ultra-high-res "Metro Radar" animated imagery 
--Animated Imagery for all 50 states, plus US National and regional views 
--A configuration dialog for saving your prefs 
--Can display both high and low res versions of all images 

Unfortunately, right now the animated satellite imagery is only available for the U.S.  If I can get appropriate imagery for other regions, I'll try to integrate it.  A standalone version of the forecaster will be available for people in other regions who don't want the satellite imagery.

USAGE: 
-Clicking the location or temp lets you change location or units (F/C).
-Click the resizer in the lower-left corner to go to compact mode. 
-Click (or DblClick) on part of the object to return to extended mode. 
-Clicking on the current weather display also lets you show/hide the Satellite widow. (in the Suite package)
-Hovering over the current conditions shows the hourly forecast.  
-Hovering over the extended forecast will show the narrative for that day.  
-Drag an image onto the glass to make it a background. 
-DblClick the background to display the configuration dialog, from which you can change the text color and change or clear the background, as well as select your hemisphere.  All of the active controls in the dialog have tooltip help. 
-See the script for details on how to change some basic defaults. 
-For the Satellite and Radar object, 
--Click the green "Configure" button to use the configuration dialog. 
--Click the blue "Zoom" button to toggle between lo-res and high-res 

EDITIONS: There are three editions of LookingGlass: the original, the Lite Edition, and the Ultra-Lite edition.  They differ only in the animated moonphase display.  The original has the ultra-high quality moonphase found in my LunaVista object.  The Lite edition has a reduced-framerate version for machines with memory constraints.  The Ultra-Lite edition has a non-animated moonphase display, for those who can't spare the RAM or just don't care for the motion. The Suite packages include the animated satellite and radar, the Forecaster packages do not (for non-U.S. users).  All the editions are available here: http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?authorid=47869


The moon is photo-quality, made from NASA imagery. You've got to see it to believe it. It's a big download, but worth it. 

I really hope everyone enjoys it. 

=============================CHANGING PROGRAM DEFAULTS========================
If you edit the script for the WeatherFrame object, you will find the following starting at about line 10:
 
'Set Program Defaults.  These are user-editable values
 WeatherInterval = 20 'Interval between forecast retrievals, in MINUTES.  The XML feed is updated hourly.
 DefaultZip = "60601" 'Default ZIP or location code if the program can't find one in storage
 ScrollInterval = 6.5 'Interval between scroller updates, in SECONDS
 CycleForecast = True 'Cycle the extended forecast between day and night.  TRUE or FALSE
 CycleInterval = 25   'Cycle interval, in SECONDS
 HoverDelay = 3       'Delay before the Hourly Forecast pops-up, in SECONDS
 RetryInterval = 15   'Delay before the script tries again to retrieve the forecast if there's an error, in SECONDS
 SouthernHemisphere = False 'Set this to True if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, so the moon phase will display correctly

By editing these values, you can change certain LookingGlass defaults.  This way, if you need to reload LookingGlass from the DXPACK, certain things, such as hemisphere, will already be set correctly.  You can also edit these values to change the behavior of LookingGlass, such as by disabling day/evening forecast cycling.  Generally speaking, changing any of these values according to the instructions is safe.  Be careful about making modifications elsewhere unless you know what you're doing.  But then again, breaking things is often the best way to learn!  Obviously you'll need to save (export) the entire object to write your changes to the DXPACK.
 
===================================SCRIPT CODE=================================
The Animated Satellite and Radar is entirely my own.

The script for the weather forecaster was originally written by Stardock, and was significantly modified by me. 

My contributions to the weather forecaster may be summarized as:

--Introduce concept and code for "layered weather effect" (LWE), which means the sky state is separate from the weather state. This makes many new things possible, like lunar phase display and time/temperature intelligence, but requires LWE-compliant icons.

--Introduce concept and code of lunar phase calculation.
--Introduce lunar animation and phase display

--Introduce concept and code of cyclic display of evening extended forecast data.
--Introduce animated transition between expanded and compact views
--Introduce animated extended forecast

--Improve accuracy of XML weather icon recognition
--Improve accuracy of location recognition
--Improve efficiency of weather display code by 65%
--Correct errors that occur when viewing the forecast for a location in a different time zone from the computer.
--Correct errors whereby the sun (indicating daytime) could be displayed at night
--Introduce concept of using internal logic to display "HOT!" forecast rather
than waiting for the XML feed to specify it, which usually doesn't happen.

--Introduce retrieval and parsing of hourly forecast data
--Introduce retrieval and parsing of narrative forecast data
--Introduce retrieval and parsing of Severe Weather Alerts

--Design for "retrieval by name" is by Tiggz.  Thanks!




=================================GRAPHIC IMAGES=================================
All moon animations and images were created by me from NASA source imagery. Shadows created by me from scratch.

Lightning, sun, and cloud images by me.

All the animations were created by me with the exception of the raindrops, which were created by Stardock.

All the still graphic source images were created by me, with the exception of:
  Snowflakes, Fog, Haze, Dust, Smoke, and some of the leaves
which were created by Stardock.


Here's Martin's go-ahead for me to overhaul all his stuff:

Will, if you want to use any of my weather objects then go ahead. 
by JourneyMan _Martin_ - 8/5/2004 2:02:28 AM 
http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=34&SkinID=60

Here's Stardock's official permission file, which applies only to the images above which were denoted as being created by Stardock.  If you want to use my stuff, please ask; I encourage people to learn from LookingGlass and build on it to improve the quality of weather objects generally.  None of my work product may be used for any commercial purpose without permission.



-----------------------


These weather images are (c) 2003 by Stardock Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Permission:
Stardock gives you permission to distribute these images and or icons freely as long as this permission document is included. 

Allowed Uses:
You may use these images with any Stardock related product (such as creating DesktopX objects or ObjectDock or plugins).

In addition, Stardock licenses this for use with content that is provided free of charge and is not connected to a commercial software product. You may use these images for skins, themes, and other content for freeware software even if it is competitive in nature with Stardock's offerings as long as the copyright notices are included. You may not, however, bundle these images in any way with any software product without Stardock's express permission.

You may use these images in your website or product as long as this permission.txt is linked somewhere along with Stardock's copyright notice with a link to Stardock's homepage: http://www.stardock.com.

Designed Use:
These weather images are designed to provide the various weather conditions reported by weather services. It was created for use with Stardock DesktopX (http://www.desktopx.net) and Stardock ObjectDock (http://www.objectdock.com) both of which allow users to monitor the weather conditions from their desktop.