This document attempts to answer some of the most commonly asked questions about MacWeather.
Q1. There aren't any cities listed that are close to me. Can you add my home town?
A1. MacWeather gets all of its information from the Internet weather servers. Simply adding a feature to MacWeather without making any change to the server would be pointless. MacWeather currently supports every city that the weather server supports.
Q2. I keep getting "City Not Found" or "No Data Available". What's wrong?
A2. There are two possibilities here. The more likely one is that the weather server simply doesn't have any data to report for the city. This happens on occasion, and is more common with the smaller sites that may not be as good in reporting data. If, however, you never get any information for a city, it could also be that the search string for the city was misspelled. Send me mail, and I'll check it out.
Q3. What is MacTCP and how do I get it?
A3. MacTCP is an extension that provides the Macintosh implementation of TCP/IP, communications protocol which allows your computer to talk to other computers on the Internet. In order to use MacTCP, you must have some type of connection to the Internet -- either through a direct Ethernet connection or from a dial-up service with SLIP or PPP capabilities. MacTCP is currently a commercial product, but it will soon be bundled with System 7.5 when it is released. For now, the best way to get MacTCP is to get the book _Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh_ by Adam Engst. This book is also an excellent resource for people new to the Internet and provides far more information on getting connected than I could ever include here.
Q4. Where can I get the most current information about MacWeather?
A4. Go to my home page on WWW: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kidwell/
You'll need a WWW client such as Mosaic, MacWeb, or lynx.
Q5. I'm interested in weather outside of North America, but there doesn't seem to be much available.
A5. The weather server's data feed is primarily for North American sites. Although they do get reports from cities outside North America, it is limited to temperature and local conditions updated twice daily. There are no plans to upgrade the data feed in the near future.
Q6. Are there any other weather resources that MacWeather does not currently support?
A6. There is quite a lot of weather information available. Here's a sample:
telnet thunder.met.fsu.edu 3000 Weather Underground very similar to UMich
telnet vortex.weather.brockport.edu 3000 Also Weather Underground, but network
is currently down
telnet vicbeta.vic.bom.gov.au 55555 Australian weather data
telnet wind.atmos.uah.edu 3000 Similar to UMich, but not a nice interface
http://www.mit.edu:8001/usa.html Complete list of weather resources
Q7. Do you plan to add support for any of these?
A7. Support for thunder.met.fsu.edu is a definite possibility, once they update their software to the current version running at UMich. vortex.weather.brockport.edu appears to be having network problems, so I haven't been able to see what's available. The others do not present data in a format that is usable to MacWeather.
Q8. Will there be a PowerPC native version?
A8. I hope so... I'm still waiting for my logic board upgrade to a PM6100. Once that comes in, I can do some debugging and find out why the initial 2.0 release (which included PowerPC native code) bombed so horribly. Don't expect too much of a speed improvement, however. The system-level TCP calls are all still emulated, but the graphical display should be a bit faster.
