Mac Weather

Introduction MacWeather allows you to connect to an Internet weather server to get current weather information and forecasts for a specified city. It requires a Mac Plus or higher with System 7.0 and MacTCP. MacWeather is shareware -- see the notice at the end of this document regarding payment. What is MacTCP? MacTCP is an extension that provides the Macintosh implementation of TCP/IP, a communications protocol which allows your computer to talk to other computers on the Internet. In order to use MacTCP, you must have some type of connection to the Internet -- either through a direct Ethernet connection or from a dial-up service with SLIP or PPP capabilities. MacTCP is currently a commercial product, but it will soon be bundled with System 7.5 when it is released. For now, the best way to get MacTCP is to get the book _Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh_ by Adam Engst. This book is also an excellent resource for people new to the Internet and provides far more information on getting connected than I could ever include here. Getting Started When MacWeather runs for the first time, it will bring up the preferences screen so that you may choose what city to view. After selecting the desired preferences, the program will attempt to connect to the weather server and get the current information for the selected city. After making the connection, the current conditions and forecast are downloaded and displayed on the screen. You can cancel the download process at any time by pressing command-period. When MacWeather starts up the next time, it will automatically get information for the current city without bringing up the preferences screen. Selecting a city can be accomplished by several different ways. First, in the Preferences window, you select the primary city using the pop-up menus. MacWeather will automatically get information for this city when it first starts up. In future versions of MacWeather, the hourly weather conditions for the primary city will be logged to a file to observe trends in temperature, barometric pressure, etc. At this time, I do not plan to add graphing support within MacWeather, but you may read the log files into any graphing program for viewing. The second method of selecting a city is by using the Location pull-down menu. Any city chosen from the Location menu is a secondary city. Use this menu to switch temporarily to different cities of interest without changing the primary city setting. After you choose the city to view by using the City menu within the Location pull-down menu, MacWeather will automatically get information on that city. The last method of selecting a city is by using the Recent menu within the Location menu. The Recent menu shows the primary city as the first menu item. If any secondary cities have been selected, they are shown below the primary city, separated by a dotted line. Use this menu to switch quickly between the last few cities viewed. When a new city is selected, MacWeather automat…