Is there a particular reason the weather widget is limited to updating no more often than every 30 minutes? It would be nice if it could update more often. Is the API the widget uses throttling us? At the very least, it would be nice if I could see the time it last updated, so I know how out of date or current the information displayed is.
How often does the data the widget queries updated?
If the underlying data is updated ever few hours it would not help to query quickly I assume.
Good question - that might explain why the widget sometimes looks wildly inaccurate, even after half an hour has passed.
what kind of a weather service only updates every few hours?
the worthless kind, that’s what kind.
can you not choose which weather service this widget is using?
asking because i don’t use this widget.
There are a few you can choose from, but the choices can be limited depending on your location. For some reason even though I live in the US, the closest weather station available to my location belongs to the BBC! The closest one belonging to the NOAA is at an airport which is on the other end of town. I know there are more weather services out there, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to add one, nor do I know what other services even support whatever protocols the widget is using. It would also be nice if I could choose based on a map, or from a list sorted by distance from my location (either using whatever geolocation features are available on Linux, or by entering a zip code or the equivalent). Right now I have to search for nearby communities by name and hope something pops up.
I guess I’m fortunate, I can open my curtains, so that I actually see when it’s going to rain without looking at my screen.
Sadly it’s not comparable, as there’s no official ‘update time’ on my window…
That’s true, but then looking outside won’t tell you the temperature (unless you have a thermometer handy), or whether it’s going to rain tomorrow!
haha well I long gave up expecting widgets to accurately tell me whether it’ll rain tomorrow - but I generally can tell whether it’s warm or cool outside without even opening the window.
The 30-minute limit: Weather APIs (like those from Apple, AccuWeather, or OpenWeather) cost money per call. If a widget updated every 60 seconds for millions of users, phone batteries would drain in 2 hours and the developers would go bankrupt. It’s a cost-saving compromise, not a technical limitation.
I’m surprised the developers aren’t bankrupt already, then! Even every 30 minutes, that’s still millions of users…
Yes: it’s to avoid overloading the weather services.
We use free services, which means everyone using this widget is basically costing one of the weather services a tiny tiny bit of money. So we need to keep our usage reasonable.
If we switched to a paid service and had KDE e.V. foot the bill, it would probably cost, at the minimum, tens of thousands of Euros. Maybe hundreds.
It seems unlikely there’s significant load on any free weather server from KDE users using the “Weather Report” widget. First of all out of the “X” number of KDE users, the Weather Report plasmoid is an “opt-in”. So only a small fraction of those “X” are going to bother with enabling Weather Report at all (I guess we mean “Weather Report”, because I’ve noticed it stops at 30 mins). Let’s pull a number out of a hat and guess 1% will setup Weather Report (WR). So that’s 0.01X.
Next, the entire 0.01X KDE users with WR aren’t all going to pile onto one weather server. There are many hundreds to thousands of weather info servers and the KDE users are all spread over the world. I’m in Maryland, USA so I use the BWI airport one. So I’ll guess that the number of pings on the BWI weather server from KDE uses like me with WR would be completely in the noise. So I’d suggest 15 mins or 30 mins, either would be fine.
Personally I’m sort of okay even with 30 mins but I’d really like if WR would actually show a time stamp of when it successfully updated (it doesn’t).
BTW, there is another Weather plasmoid called Wunderground, that one lets you go down to 300 secs (5 mins) as the lowest minimum, I set it to 900 seconds. That’s really nice but just takes up too much desktop real estate IMO, even if I set that to “compact” format and use really small fonts. However, Wunderground does show a “freshness timestamp” which is really nice.
my android weather app only goes down to every 30 min.
never been a problem.
For what it’s worth, I think this might be confusing weather stations with weather servers - ex. all of the station results returned in this search come from one of two servers, NOAA or BBC:
What’s described here might be helpful context for folks wanting to see how data sourcing works for a widget like the one you described: Is this weather widget privacy friendly? · Issue #146 · k-donn/plasmoid-wunderground · GitHub
Advanced Weather widget has option to change time interval check.
p.s. forgot to mention that the app only kicks in for me on the panel at reboot.
I tried the Wunderground widget and it looks really nice! I was able to find several weather stations closer to my location than the one I was using with the stock widget, and Wunderground reports a lot more data, can be set to update as often as every 5 minutes, and displays a timestamp of when it last updated - everything I was looking for! I don’t mind the large size, though when I first installed it, everything was crammed into a tiny box. I eventually found out that the popups when you click on a widget in the taskbar can now be resized - that feature must have been added recently, because I swear I’ve tried that before with other widgets and it didn’t work.