weather widget not working

The way it's done is quite messy, I'm afraid. First: you need to lay your hands on a Mac running Snow Leopard or Lion. And second: you need to muddle about with system files in the Finder. It's not the hardest hack ever, by any means, but it is a potentially tricky one.

Ordinarily, you'd never want to touch anything inside the System folder. I wouldn't advise civilians to poke about in there.

Darn. I just clicked around a bit and discovered that my OS is quite old, indeed. It's not even 1.0.4 or whatever--it's from 2006, 1.0.2! I don't even have a widget resources selection in my Sys Pref.

So, essentially I need an OS upgrade in order to get my weather widget back, right? Can my MacBook handle the OS upgrade in terms of memory (I am very ignorant of this stuff)? I cannot afford a whole new MacBook....

Guess I'll have to stick my head out my window for the weather now.

If your Mac is an Intel, you may as well upgrade to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) which would avoid this problem entirely. Click the Apple Menu at the top left of the screen and go to About This Mac to get an overview. If the processor line says Intel anywhere on it, you're in luck. I'd seek out a local friendly Mac geek to see about RAM and how to get the software.

I'm on a PowerBook G4 (from 2003) and so don't actually have that option with this Mac. But then again, running the really old stuff this day and age does tend to mean to have to get your hands dirty.

This is more fun than crosswords.

For those without access to 10.6, I'm thinking that replacing just the weatherParser.js is the way to go.

Could someone with 10.6 or 10.7 post their weatherParser.js here? Or is that impossible due to its size?

weatherParser.js is located in /system/library/widgetresources/.parsers/ .

Its size in 10.5 is 16 KB.

If posting the file here is not advisable, changing just the URLs might work. Someone already asked for the 10.6 URLs in an earlier post, but no one has answered.

Would someone with 10.6 have a look in their weatherParser.js and paste here the URLs in the following functions in the script ? (I find the URLs by searching for "http"):

function fetchWeatherData (callback, zip)

function validateWeatherLocation (location, callback)

I'm guessing that weatherParser.js in 10.6 is probably identical to the one in 10.5 except for the URLs.

Here is a weatherParser.js that is almost identical to the one in my 10.5, including the URLs:

http://www.apple.com/widgets/weatherParser.js

An aside: Couldn't Apple fix this real quick by redirecting the URLs coded in 10.5 to the targets used in 10.6?

OK, in 10.6.5 I get...

function fetchWeatherData (callback, zip)

{

var uid = getUID();

var url = 'http://iphone-wu.apple.com/dgw?imei=' + uid + '&apptype=weather&t=' + numRequests++;

...

function validateWeatherLocation (location, callback)

{

var uid = getUID();

var url = 'http://iphone-wu.apple.com/dgw?imei=' + uid + '&apptype=weather&t=' + numRequests++;

...

Samr thing in 10.7.2. 🙂

Yes, it has Intel! And I am wrong (again!) about the OS: it IS 10.4.11. I started with 10.2 whatever.

Now, I do not know a Mac geek... Wait, my friend's son might be a resource. (but wouldn't it be easier to just go to the Apple store and buy the upgrade?)

Thanks BDAqua.

What you've pasted looks very different from what's in 10.5.

I guess it's not a matter of just replacing the URLs.

Hi, I thought John Muir's soluttion of replacing the resource or whatever it was was great, did you try it?

Where I live the standard weather widget is useless, it might be snoing here & 2 blocks away be sunny or raining. 🙂

Where can I get that second weather widget?

That version looks much better than the one I've got right now (directly from AccuWeather), and is certainly more readable. If the standard Weather widget is dead for non-Intel machines, it would be a blessing.

The orange widget is here:

http://gallery.djinngo.com/gallery/widget_pcmac_world-weather_1204.html?hl=en

I like the comments on its homepage. The widget may look almost as nice as Apple's one, but these guys don't seem to know how to do dates right. The weekday labels are always two full days off for me, here.

I'm running Apple's original again just fine on my PowerPC G4 way back on Tiger. All it takes is the appropriate few kilobytes of system files copied from an Intel Mac. These widgets themselves are platform agnostic.

eleanorigby wrote:

Yes, it has Intel! And I am wrong (again!) about the OS: it IS 10.4.11. I started with 10.2 whatever.

Now, I do not know a Mac geek... Wait, my friend's son might be a resource. (but wouldn't it be easier to just go to the Apple store and buy the upgrade?)

Intel is indeed good news. Most Intel Macs can run Lion, and all of them have Snow Leopard as an alternative: both actively supported by Apple.

You can tell if yours can run Lion by looking at that same line in About This Mac as you spotted "Intel". If it also says Core 2 Duo (or Core i5 or other numbers for more modern Macs) that's a 64 bit processor, which is Lion's demand, so you can go for either 10.6 or 10.7. If it says Core Duo – no number between the words – then you have a 32 bit processor and Snow Leopard is the way to go.

The one stumbling block is you're way back on 10.4. From what I remember, Apple supports upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6, and 10.6 to 10.7 (if your Mac is 64 bit), but they stopped selling 10.5 years ago. It's possible to buy a 10.5 disc second hand if necessary, but a good geek (or maybe a kind Apple Genius*) ought to be able to get you up on the latest you can handle via a shortcut, meaning you'd only have to spend $29 on 10.6.

10.6 Snow Leopard:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A

Still fully supported by Apple and quite likely all you need or want.

10.7 Lion is in the App Store (which installs as part of Snow Leopard once you've run all its software updates).

*Edinburgh is still waiting on its Apple Store, so I have very little experience with the Genius Bar personally. I've heard they can be very cool indeed, but you've got to remember they answer straight to Apple and might not be at liberty to use all the tricks a friendly freelance nerd can.

Anyway, there's new life in that old Intel yet. Good luck. And make a backup!

John - I have both tiger and snow leopard running on my core 2 duo imac under a dual boot setup. when I boot to snow leopard (10.6.8) the weather widget works, but when I followed these instructions and copied that widget from the library/widgets folder in snow leopard to the same folder in tiger it does not work. tiger does not recognize this widget, i.e., the widget does not even appear in the widgets bar although it is present in the widgets folder.

And I do not see a "widgetresources" folder, as has been described in this post. I only have a library/widgets folder.

Any ideas?

emgee wrote:

And I do not see a "widgetresources" folder, as has been described in this post. I only have a library/widgets folder.

Any ideas?

The correct folder is /System/Library/WidgetResources

Yes, there's a Library folder inside there too.

Once you have that coped (from Snowy to Tiger, definitely not the opposite!) then a restart should sort things out. If you've still got trouble, it might be because of precisely how you're dual booting.

Thanks for the link to the Orange Weather Widget. If the other stays dead and I can't run the hack on it, I may add this if they fix it.

They have another major problem with their widget… I live in Wilmington Delaware... if you type in Wilmington, you get over 50 options, NONE of which have any info other than country to confirm it's correct. That means that there's more than 20 in the United States to choose from, and a handful if you are in the U.K. Definitely not good. Lord help you, if you live in Springfield or Greenville.

Has anyone, yet, managed to supply a download for the 10.6 or 10.7 parts that can be exchanged and modified in Tiger? I do not have access to the Intel OSs unless I walk into either the Christiana or Soho Apple Stores. Neither of which is exactly close by.

i downloaded the widget limnos suggested...

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/information/weatherundergrounddashboard weatherwidget.html

also dl'ed the orange widget. the orange widget is not 2 days off but 2 days and a full month, when i scroll over the days it shows the month of december?

seijo, put your zipcode in location instead of city name with the orange, that got me the correct st. louis

sadly i want my original weather widget back but don't have access to 10.6 and don't have the experiance to fix it even if i did. i can click the location on the faulty widget and it will open the webpage with the weather from my location.