Making a weather radar app for Power PC

[Old Man McGuggins]

I bought my first iMac for $20 and it was a G5 17 inch with no addons or any fun trinkets other than it and a cable. I've since gotten an iBook G4 and 2 tray loading G3 machines. I love my G5, but it's lack of software always saddened me. I made an account here, using that exact G5 (I pray that's safe on interweb PPC LOL), and now want to know if there would be any support to a PowerPC Live weather radar. Like i'm talking a window, with just the NWS Doppler radar open, that auto reloads, so it's a pure weather app you can have in the background. I used Interweb PPC for this, but reloading and stuff just because a hassle. Is there a PowerPC version of Windows forms? I think that would work but that's easy on windows, i've never worked on iMac PowerPCs. I want to fix the holes PowerPC has, and I want to start it with this. How do I make this mess, and would you use it?

EDIT - Released! Added v1 zip. Fixed so I don't get sued and so when you add it to Applications it just works.
EDIT 2 - Mac Garden Newest version

 

[MrCheeto]

If you have found a website that essentially does what you described on your iMac, have you considered using the Web Clip widget?

Back in Leopard I loved making clips of Pandora, eBay auctions, and sites like what you’re describing. RIP

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Really? Does this still work? It runs like a normal window, right? How do I do this! We've been getting hit by storms and just yesterday we had flooding, snow, and a tornado all in one day within one 40 mile area, so I thought "why not track this using my iMac?" If this gets closed I will open a new thread asking more about PowerPC development through XCode. By the way, is the mac garden XCode download safe? It gave me a checksum error, but I kept going.

 

[B S Magnet]

I bought my first iMac for $20 and it was a G5 17 inch with no addons or any fun trinkets other than it and a cable. I've since gotten an iBook G4 and 2 tray loading G3 machines. I love my G5, but it's lack of software always saddened me. I made an account here, using that exact G5 (I pray that's safe on interweb PPC LOL), and now want to know if there would be any support to a PowerPC Live weather radar. Like i'm talking a window, with just the NWS Doppler radar open, that auto reloads, so it's a pure weather app you can have in the background. I used Interweb PPC for this, but reloading and stuff just because a hassle. Is there a PowerPC version of Windows forms? I think that would work but that's easy on windows, i've never worked on iMac PowerPCs. I want to fix the holes PowerPC has, and I want to start it with this. How do I make this mess, and would you use it?

Perhaps the simplest way to accomplish what you need here is to box it up, à la TenFourFoxBox. I can’t recall whether there’s a TFFB equivalent for Interweb-PPC. Maybe @wicknix can verify?

(Also, props on your handle. Dipper and Mabel are proud. Gruncle Stan, who even knows…)

 

[Vref]

I bought my first iMac for $20 and it was a G5 17 inch with no addons or any fun trinkets other than it and a cable. I've since gotten an iBook G4 and 2 tray loading G3 machines. I love my G5, but it's lack of software always saddened me. I made an account here, using that exact G5 (I pray that's safe on interweb PPC LOL), and now want to know if there would be any support to a PowerPC Live weather radar. Like i'm talking a window, with just the NWS Doppler radar open, that auto reloads, so it's a pure weather app you can have in the background. I used Interweb PPC for this, but reloading and stuff just because a hassle. Is there a PowerPC version of Windows forms? I think that would work but that's easy on windows, i've never worked on iMac PowerPCs. I want to fix the holes PowerPC has, and I want to start it with this. How do I make this mess, and would you use it?

Uhh, we’ll I can say as someone who uses both internet and onboard radar for a living…

Replicate what foreflight used to have with trend lines and you could have something

Each dot was where the cell was going to be in 20min

But if it’s just like NWS radar, I can get that better on windy or NOAA or a million other places

Also include strikes from this source and you’ll be onto something

Real Time Lightning Map

See lightning strikes in real time across the planet. Free access to maps of former thunderstorms. By Blitzortung.org and contributors.

www.lightningmaps.org

 

[B S Magnet]

Uhh, we’ll I can say as someone who uses both internet and onboard radar for a living…

Replicate what foreflight used to have with trend lines and you could have something

Each dot was where the cell was going to be in 20min

But if it’s just like NWS radar, I can get that better on windy or NOAA or a million other places

Also include strikes from this source and you’ll be onto something

Real Time Lightning Map

See lightning strikes in real time across the planet. Free access to maps of former thunderstorms. By Blitzortung.org and contributors.

www.lightningmaps.org

It used to be WU used to provide this data, as well, but they killed that off some time ago.

 

[Vref]

It used to be WU used to provide this data, as well, but they killed that off some time ago.

Sadly even foreflight at almost $400 per year has majorly downgraded their radar, and their lightning strikes are now very inaccurate

It’s pixelated like 1990s crap lol

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Uhh, we’ll I can say as someone who uses both internet and onboard radar for a living…

Replicate what foreflight used to have with trend lines and you could have something

Each dot was where the cell was going to be in 20min

But if it’s just like NWS radar, I can get that better on windy or NOAA or a million other places

Also include strikes from this source and you’ll be onto something

Real Time Lightning Map

See lightning strikes in real time across the planet. Free access to maps of former thunderstorms. By Blitzortung.org and contributors.

www.lightningmaps.org

The source is NWS but I couldn't find an actual radar app.

Lightining though.... Oooh man, that's an attractive item to add. Just gotta figure out how to build this.My plan was something in XCode, but no XCode download I can find works.

 

[B S Magnet]

Sadly even foreflight at almost $400 per year has majorly downgraded their radar, and their lightning strikes are now very inaccurate

It’s pixelated like 1990s crap lol

Pixellated doesn’t really bother me, just so long as the data is current and plotted correctly. But then again, I’ve been accustomed to Doppler visual data being pixellated for a long time.

What isn’t acceptable, especially for a USD$400 subscription, is being fed bad, inaccurate data.

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Pixellated doesn’t really bother me, just so long as the data is current and plotted correctly. But then again, I’ve been accustomed to Doppler visual data being pixellated for a long time.

Really? Doppler isn't normally so blocky? I love the little blocks, it's like down to your neighborhood sized radar cubes!

Lightning could suck though, because given how inaccurate that 400 dollar tool is, nothing free will be nearly as good, and not even my local news team can get it right. Their software graphs lightning in the middle of nowhere. I'm cooked. Perhaps a second lightning panel mode that opens another dataset with lightning so you can kinda guess? Also if I remember, the data I used did have lightning storm warnings. Not strike by strike dots, but patches. Honestly I doubt @Vref would be able to get much professional mileage out of it anyways because 400 dollar stuff won't even work right and I seriously doubt there's any chance my PowerPC freeware would be allowed anywhere near whatever that job is, let alone there even being PowerPCs anywhere there. Buddy, I don't know what your job is, but I think my PowerPC software there would likely end in disaster.

But yes, I want to try for adding lightning.

If anyone knows how on earth I should do this, let me know. It has to run like Excel or Interwebppc or iMovie, in a window, so that it can be used in the background and flipped to like another app. That is easy on Windows using a Form in Visual Studio, but I'm clueless on Apple, let alone PowerPC.

 

[wicknix]

I can’t recall whether there’s a TFFB equivalent for Interweb-PPC.

Yep. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/inthebox
This will work fine, can have it's own icon, and be a separate "app" in it's own resizable window. It wont auto refresh the weather page though. It'd have to be done manually.

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Yep. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/inthebox
This will work fine, can have it's own icon, and be a separate "app" in it's own resizable window. It wont auto refresh the weather page though. It'd have to be done manually.

Thats unfortunate. Because I am not sure if NWS auto updates live while the page is running. Can someone check before I box it up? Also, any development tips for PowerPC I should know?

 

[Dronecatcher]

InTheBox is up to the task - it's finding a site that auto refreshes. Though it may be possible to write an AppleScript that asks your app to refresh the page at intervals?

I did a quick attempt using https://radar.weather.gov - as you can see, not too demanding - 23% CPU...and my Powerbook is downclocked to 800Mhz.

 

[AphoticD]

If the site/page isn't going to auto-refresh, you could use a simple iframe with a meta refresh (no JS required).

<html>
    <head>
       <title>My Auto-Refresher</title>
       <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10"><!-- seconds -->
    </head>
    <body style="margin:0;padding:0;">
        <iframe src="https://radar.weather.gov/" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0"></iframe>
    </body>
</html>

Change the refresh seconds and update the src URL for your needs. Save as "refresher.html" or similar, open with a browser/box and it should refresh itself as expected.

 

[Dronecatcher]

This is how I did it with AppleScript to refresh every minute:

on idle

    tell application "WeatheRadar.app"
       
        activate
               
        tell application "System Events"
           
            tell process "InterWebPPC"
               
                keystroke "r" using {command down}
               
            end tell           
           
        end tell
       
        return 60
       
    end tell
   
end idle

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Great work, guys. But. Can Integrate the script into the launcher for it, so that every time it runs it pops open the script?

And change the icon, of course.

 

[MrCheeto]

Does this still work?

I don’t know and I don’t even know if it will work based on any other browser. Just my first thought because when I used Leopard I had a web clip for Pandora that was my sole way of using the app on my laptop. It would stay logged in and always allow the content to function exactly as it did on the web page.

 

[Boyd01]

I built a little website with NEXRAD radar for the US that auto-refreshes and might meet your needs, but can't discuss it here due to MacRumors policy.

Anyway, If you can use current web standards like https and javascript, the code isn't all that complex. I used the open source MapTalks API to display the map (you could certainly do the same kind of thing with OpenLayers, Google, Mapbox or other mapping API's).

I created my own simple US basemap to overlay on top of the radar, there are a variety of free sources of this kind of GIS data, such as the National Weather Service. Of course, you would need GIS software and know how to use it.

To avoid creating your own map, you could use a variety of free map tiles from OpenStreetMap, MapBox, HERE, Bing, Google and others. In that case, you would be overlaying the radar on top of the basemap where it may cover up features. One approach to that problem is to make the radar imagery transparent, so the basemap shows through.

I took the opposite approach and overlaid a simple map on top of the radar so it's always visible, but had to create a custom map for that.

The radar data comes from the National Weather Service but has been aggregated into a US mosaic by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, which they update about every 5 minutes. If you look around that site, you'll see they have a wealth of radar data.

As for making the site auto-refresh, with javascript I used setTimeout to execute window.location.reload(true) after 180 seconds. This simply reloads the site every three minutes (admittedly crude, but it works).

If you have a web server on your PPC Mac, you could create your own private version of such a site, I do that on my 2018 Mini using MAMP. But is it possible to use current web standards on PPC Macs today (my G5 died around 2007)?

Alternately, if you have a way to access modern websites on your PPC Mac, you could just go to an existing website and not have to do any of this.

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

I built a little website with NEXRAD radar for the US that auto-refreshes and might meet your needs, but can't discuss it here due to MacRumors policy.

Anyway, If you can use current web standards like https and javascript, the code isn't all that complex. I used the open source MapTalks API to display the map (you could certainly do the same kind of thing with OpenLayers, Google, Mapbox or other mapping API's).

I created my own simple US basemap to overlay on top of the radar, there are a variety of free sources of this kind of GIS data, such as the National Weather Service. Of course, you would need GIS software and know how to use it.

To avoid creating your own map, you could use a variety of free map tiles from OpenStreetMap, MapBox, HERE, Bing, Google and others. In that case, you would be overlaying the radar on top of the basemap where it may cover up features. One approach to that problem is to make the radar imagery transparent, so the basemap shows through.

I took the opposite approach and overlaid a simple map on top of the radar so it's always visible, but had to create a custom map for that.

The radar data comes from the National Weather Service but has been aggregated into a US mosaic by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, which they update about every 5 minutes. If you look around that site, you'll see they have a wealth of radar data.

As for making the site auto-refresh, with javascript I used setTimeout to execute window.location.reload(true) after 180 seconds. This simply reloads the site every three minutes (admittedly crude, but it works).

If you have a web server on your PPC Mac, you could create your own private version of such a site, I do that on my 2018 Mini using MAMP. But is it possible to use current web standards on PPC Macs today (my G5 died around 2007)?

Alternately, if you have a way to access modern websites on your PPC Mac, you could just go to an existing website and not have to do any of this.

This all seems nice, but because of the end goal (launch able application) this doesn't really work. I want to be able to open it like an app on a phone or on a windows pc. Hence why I'm so interested in the proposal of boxing the site, all I need is to change the icon and bundle auto reload and see if it is an application I can distribute here or somewhere else.

And yep, modern internet on PowerPC works great. I've been posting from a G5.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Great work, guys. But. Can Integrate the script into the launcher for it, so that every time it runs it pops open the script?

And change the icon, of course.

I'm not sure whether you're referring to my solution or the one from @AphoticD ?

But on mine the code is saved as an Application (Stay Open) which when clicked opens the InTheBox instance and refreshs the page every minute.

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

I'm not sure whether you're referring to my solution or the one from @AphoticD ?

But on mine the code is saved as an Application (Stay Open) which when clicked opens the InTheBox instance and refreshs the page every minute.

That's beautiful. Your solution. Could I make a launcher for this and then make it have a nice little icon, and then zip that up so others can have it?

 

[Dronecatcher]

That's beautiful. Your solution. Could I make a launcher for this and then make it have a nice little icon, and then zip that up so others can have it?

Absolutely

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Absolutely

How would I do this?

Also I will credit you and everyone else here in the .zip

 

[MrCheeto]

Alternately, if you have a way to access modern websites on your PPC Mac, you could just go to an existing website and not have to do any of this.

Sure but OP has an idea and really what’s the fun in settling for the basic route? Here’s to OP’s spirit in adding more function to the abandoned platform. Just for fun I’m going to test his packaged app on my Mac Pro in Leopard.

 

[Old Man McGuggins]

Does anyone know how to make a custom launcher that will do as @Dronecatcher is suggesting as well as instantly launch the boxed app