# The &kweather; Handbook

## Introduction

&kweather; is an application that provides both a panel icon, allowing you to watch the weather as reported by a local weather station, and providing a weather service that can track multiple weather stations and provide this information to other applications including &konqueror;'s sidebar and &kontact;'s summary page.

## Using &kweather; as a Panel Applet

&RMB; click on an empty space in the panel and choose Add Applet KWeather

A configuration dialog will open up. Initially the only configuration required to make &kweather; work is the ICAO location code:.

This is a four character code used by the weather reporting service to uniquely identify weather stations around the world.

As it's unlikely that most people will happen to know this directly, there is a link to a search engine where you can look it up.

While the weather stations available are fairly comprehensive, not every town in every country will be represented, simply because not every town has an appropriate weather station. If your own town is not represented, you should choose the one nearest you. Since flying planes safely requires accurate weather data, most towns with an airport will be in the list, so a good bet is to look for the nearest airport to you.

At this point, you can press the OK button and the dialog will close. You will now have an icon displaying the current weather graphically on your panel. Clicking it once will open a window that shows the weather in detail.

Further configuration is described in the next chapter.

## Configuring &kweather;

### Display

Weather Station Options

- ICAO location code:

- Enter your location code here. This is a four letter alphabetic code. If you don't know it, you can click on the link labeled Lookup Your ICAO Code to use a web based search engine to find it.

Panel Display Options

- Show icon only

  Show temperature only

  Show temperature and wind information

- You can choose here if the temperature should be displayed beside the icon, or if the current wind speed, direction, and air pressure are also displayed.

  If only the temperature is shown, it is displayed in a large font to fit the panel height. If wind information is shown, the temperature and the wind information are displayed in a smaller font, on three lines.

  The icon is always shown.

Logging Options

- Enable logging

- By default &kweather; does not retain old weather information, and each time it updates the weather the old information is discarded. If you wish instead to keep a record of the weather, enable this option.

Log file

- If you have enabled the Enable logging check box, this option will become available. Enter or browse to the location you would like &kweather; to keep it's log file.

### Weather Service

Station Manager

Update timeout:

- Set here the amount of time in seconds &kweather; should wait before giving up on fetching a weather update.

Update All Stations

- Update all the listed stations immediately.

Stop Weather Service

- Stop fetching weather updates for all listed stations, and stop providing weather information to the &konqueror; sidebar and &kontact;

## &kweather; Interfaces

While the most obvious &kweather; interface is the panel icon, there are several other places where you can access &kweather;'s information. These are particularly useful if you need to watch multiple weather stations. While &kweather; allows you to track multiple weather stations, the panel icon displays only one at a time.

These additional services are plug-ins to their respective applications, and not provided with &kweather; itself.

## Credits and Licenses

&kweather; copyright © Ian Reinhart Geiser geiseri@users.sourceforge.net

## Contributors

Will Andrews wca@users.sourceforge.net

- Fixes for BSD port

Ben Burton benb@acm.org

- Debian fixes

Otto Bruggeman bruggie@home.nl

- Fixed the i18n stuff and source style cleanups

Nadeem Hasan nhasan@nadmm.com

- Lots of bug fixes, improvements and cleanups.

Carles Carbonell Bernado mail@carlitus.net

- Great new weather icons

John Ratke jratke@comcast.net

- Improvements and more code cleanups

&underGPL; &underFDL;
&documentation.index;