Free tool for monitoring sea weather conditions. Comes in form a Sidebar Gadget for Microsoft Windows Vista. It was developed for freedivers, but may be well suitable also for scuba divers, fishers, sailors, surfers, or anyone else interested in weather and water conditions at a specific location. It monitors the following data:
Weather information comes from the AccuWeather website, wave information from CANDHIS, and the tide information from EasyTide. All data is available for locations worldwide, except of the wave information that is currently only locations in French territories. Up to five freely configurable webcams can be cyclically displayed on the gadget. Currently you can add any webcams with a Jpeg output.
If you are running MS Vista, you can install the free gadget by clicking this link. Set up then the parameters in the configuration of the gadget: chose between metric and imperial unit system, adjust the refresh rate, enter addresses of webcams you want to monitor on the gadget, and chose locations for monitoring the weather, waves, and tide info.
Webcams need to be set up manually. It means you need to find a suitable webcam on the web, and then entering the URL of the webcam's image. Sometimes it appears directly in the address bar of your browser (it then usually ends by .jpg), or in the properties of the webcam image (right click the image, select Properties, and then copy the URL Address), or in the HTML source of the page. In some cases the address of the webcam image may be variable - dynamically changing each couple of minutes or seconds. In such case, you can use the syntax EXTRACT part FROM url, where part stands for a partial image address as found on the page (only the static part that does not change with time), and url is the address of the page containing the webcam image.
Location for the weather info can be selected directly on the configuration page - enter the name of your town or a close by location, click the button at the right side, wait a while till options load, and then select the matching one. At locations for wave and tide info, you need to visit the websites of the services offering the information, searching a matching location there, copying its numeric ID from the browser address bar, and then entering it into the gadget configuration.
1.0.0.12 - Oct 13th 2008 - workaround to avoid caching of webcam pages 1.0.0.11 - Oct 12th 2008 - enabled automatic extracting of webcam adress from an HTML page (using syntax EXTRACT partial_webcam_pic_url FROM html_page_url) 1.0.0.10 - Oct 9th 2008 - added link and some layout adjustments in configuration 1.0.0.9 - Oct 8th 2008 - fixed tide parsing with one tide peak a day only 1.0.0.8 - Oct 6th 2008 - new background images - fixed bug in wind direction symbol at 0 deg - more detailed AccuWeather radar map in Flyout 1.0.0.7 - Oct 5th 2008 - synchronisation of webcam images between gadget and flyout - mouse-over titles at external links (AccuWeather, CAMDHIS, EasyTide) 1.0.0.6 - Oct 5th 2008 - added Next button for switching webcams instead of using the entire image - added onMouseOver opacity on the Next button - suppresed flyover on clicking the Next button 1.0.0.5 - Oct 5th 2008 - added localized versions of the main pane in FR, CZ, and DE - added simple flyout (same layout as the undocked gadget) - added copyright and a link to apneabase.org 1.0.0.4 - Oct 4th 2008 - added placeholder image for webcam not available - added instructions for entering tide and wave id's - added instructions for entering webcam URL's 1.0.0.3 - Oct 4th 2008 - bug in saving webcam URL settings fixed - date/hour variables possible in webcam URL 1.0.0.2 - Oct 4th 2008 - added two more webcams (total five) - added alt image text with the URL of the webcam - localization removed - installation package corrected 1.0.0.1 - Oct 4th 2008 - added 3rd default web camera for Herault - now showing correctly the time of the next tide - added wind and waves direction symbols on the docked pane - added links to external data sources for weather, waves, and tides - removed link from city name 1.0.0.0 - Oct 3rd 2008 - first released version
