Tag: projects

Spincloud now integrates with Europe’s weather warning service Meteoalarm

Spincloud + Meteoalarm
A short month after the initial public release of Spincloud, I am pleased to announce the addition of a new feature: integration with the European weather warning service Meteoalarm which provides the most relevant information needed to prepare for extreme weather, expected to occur over Europe.  The colors indicate the severity of the danger and its possible impact: Red: very dangerous, Orange: dangerous, Yelllow: potentially dangerous, Green: no warnings.

Currently only the country-level warnings are displayed. You can access the new feature by clicking the “Meteoalarm” button located on the top-left corner of the map. Note that the map has to be positioned over Europe for this buttton to be enabled.
More information about Meteoalarm here.

Important note: When using this new feature, the best experience is with Google’s Chrome, Mozilla or Safari browsers. Enabling the Meteoalarm overlay is much slower on IE browser which sometimes results in the browser reporting a slow-running script on slower hardware. Wait a few more seconds, the new overlay will render eventually.

Announcing a new weahter mashup: Spincloud

I started working on Spincloud back in 2003 when I got interested in regular expressions. I liked them so much I started looking for large sets of freely available data that I could crunch. Weather data was quite appealing; not only I’d parse it but I could get instant feedback by just looking at the parsed data, after all we understand temperatures and wind speeds and the like. I’d get to use other technologies I couldn’t experiment at work where I was doing the regular J2EE stuff and I kept feeling the itch to do new things.

And so Spincloud was born; it’s mission: to track the weather worldwide. It didn’t have a name back then but as things started to shape-up, I realized that the experiment was slowly turning into a real project. Then Google published its Maps API and I just knew that my small little pet project just found the perfect playground. It’s been a while since I started with this and I had no intention of publishing it initially. It has grown beyond its initial purpose and I feel it’s time to set it free.

This is the third version of Spincloud, the first two iterations were not publicly released. This is not an open source project; however, I’m planning on blogging about the technical challenges I’m encountering and are interesting enough to share.

Here are the main features of Spincloud:

– Instant weather search
– Forecast displayed for all available locations in surveyed area (US only); radar mashup.
– Upon free registration, one can tag favorite locations then track the weather either through the website or via RSS; ability to set a home location 
– Integration with Flickr
– Ability to add comments for individual locations through Google Friend Connect
– Easy registration that uses OpenId and Facebook Connect.
– Both metric and imperial units of measures supported.

Update: googlemapsmania.com just ran a story about Spincloud here. Thanks guys!