When the first wireless Palm OS handhelds(Vii series et al) appeared, services that provided you with weather information began to flourish. Today, I look at 4cast by ShSh software - this program is interesting, as it can work without wireless connectivity on the handheld!
You can add a city to 4cast easily - once the city is added, it stays in the convinient ‘city selector’:
4cast displays the weather data for a single city at the time:
Today’s prognosis is especially detailled, the display alternates between the “whole day” forecast and the current status:
In addition, various weather parameters and a textual forecast are also available for the current day:
Data is taken from the Yahoo web site. 4cast can update itself wirelessly(for example, via GSM, Bluetooth or WLAN); instaling a conduit on your Windows machine(the PC obviously needs access to the internet) also lets you update the weather information at every hotsync.
The responsive and friendly developer informed us that 4cast can be used as “data plugin” for various applications like ZLauncher, DateBK and 2day. However, we didn’t have any such app handy and thus didn’t test this.
Overall, it is difficult to say anything bad about 4cast - the no-frills program does its job well. The program costs 10$ on PalmGear(and currently is on sale for 8$) - if you want to know the weather and don’t want to surf with your web browser, this is a great and affordable way to go!
I agree — great little app. I use it every day. I have ZLauncher and have used the 4cast plugin. The plugin will show the current day’s forecast for all of the cities you have set up (there is an option that will “rotate” through the cities displayed in ZLauncher using the plugin).
Hi Scott,
thank you for the cool comment!
One day, I will have to look at ZLauncher!
Best regards
Tam Hanna
No problem. One not so small correction: it’s actually the 2day plugin that will rotate cities. The ZLauncher plugin only displays the currently selected city in 4cast. Sorry for the error.
As an aside, ZLauncher is nice with tons of configuration options and lots of free skins. Lately, however, I’ve been playing with the recently updated Launcher X on my TX and I really like the “clean” (but admittedly retro) look of Launcher X. There’s actually a Launcher X skin for ZLauncher, but in my opinion it doesn’t look or work as well as the original LX. No 4cast plugin for LX, though.
Fellow readers and fellow 4cast-users might have noticed, that the Hotsync-Conduit stopped working. Yahoo changed the format of their weather-data…. but there’s already an updated version of 4cast available.