Melissa dela Merced

Information Display is a weather and news application meant to be displayed on an external screen other than a personal computer.

This project is a different take on news and weather consumption. Is there a another way to display the information?

Built on Processing Java, I initially coded the weather based on the date of the computer that it was on.

The original weather project with no data and just computer drawn images.

My second iteration uses the Yahoo Weather API data to provide more accurate data.

Thanks to NYU Professor Daniel Shiffman’s Yahoo Weather API code for Processing, I had somewhere to begin with. Going through the Yahoo API wasn’t that hard and neither was parsing the data from the XML feed. I did however wanted to find locations outside the US since the original code is based on using ZIP for location. A newer version of the Yahoo Weather API uses their own WOEID which includes places outside the US but the syntax is not as easy as just entering the zip code. I didn’t want to figure out how to map the entire WOEID database for this project so I selected a few cities for me.

I wanted to work with the flickr API as well into integrating photos appropriate to the weather condition but it wasn’t being cooperative. I ended up tagging the weather pattern data to images manually. None of the images are locally stored. This causes a bit of a slowdown but makes the file smaller.

Figures are in Fahrenheit.

Using two XML parsing codes is a bit challenging. There’s something in the flickr API that isn’t just working for me so each image is manually assigned to each weather condition set by Yahoo.

The next version added the news feed aspect.

By parsing the XML feeds of Yahoo and the AP News Headlines

Future development on this project would be to conform the images to the location and weather pattern. Add a clothing suggestion. Ability to change location without having to enter the code manually for every city you want to check. Add video or live stream of the city displayed.

Built for the Introduction to the Computational Media class with Danny Rozin.