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In the spirit of writing more demos for Qt/S60, I thought about having something that I will actually use on a daily basis. A weather applet came to my mind. While my previous weather example was more a visual web-scraping attempt based on QtWebKit, this time I wanted something else and hence I decided to use the unofficial Google Weather API just like what is used in Weather Globe Google gadget. The query for this Google service will give back the result in an XML format, which is quite easy to parse. Unfortunately Qt/S60 Tower release does not bundle the XML Patterns module yet, so I have to use the classic stream reader to digest the XML data.
Here is the screenshot of this little weather tool running on the desktop. Use right-click to pop up the context menu, from which you can choose one of the predefined places. The dialog to ask the user for a custom location is left as an exercise for the readers. The beautiful icons are taken from the Tango Desktop Project with an additional set from darkobra at devianart.com. Because I want to take into account the different S60 phone resolutions, these vector-based icons are rendered at run-time thanks to our QtSvg module.
Just like in the case of both the digital clock and kinetic scrolling demos, Alessandro was (more than) willing to waste his precious time filming the following video, for our pleasure. It shows the weather info running on Nokia 5800.
The code is just one git pull away from the usual repository, see the weatherinfo subdirectory. As you might guess, it is using Graphics View, although the layout and animation are done semi-manually. This is because I want to make sure it looks good both on Portrait and Landscape Mode. If you are brave and want to experiment, convert the simple animation to use the brand-new Animation Framework slated for Qt 4.6. Still need some challenges? How about using XPath and XQuery to process the XML? Feel free to implement auto refresh and multiple cities features, too!
Last but not least: thank you, Google!
