As you are probably aware by now, the 5 day Weather Forecast feature in Winstep Xtreme has stopped working as of today, May 6th 2008.

Here is the current situation:

The Weather Channel provides a weather forecast XML feed as a free service to application and web developers provided you adhere to their strict terms of service. These terms of service, however, are primarily oriented to web sites and stand-alone weather forecasting applications, which makes it very difficult for applications like Winstep Xtreme to comply 100%.

When the weather forecast feature was added to Winstep Xtreme, every effort was made to comply with their terms of service to the best of our knowledge. Unfortunately the Weather Channel provided no way to verify that their feed requirement limits were being adhered to, and, up until today, those terms of service were apparently being loosely enforced.

On April 30th I received a general email from the Weather Channel stating the following:

We are contacting you because you are a registrant for the weather.com XML Data Feed (the ?Service?). We are providing you with IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING THE CONTINUATION OF YOUR ACCESS TO THE SERVICE. Your registered application may or may not currently be in compliance with the terms of our agreement (please refer to the developer SDK containing the license agreement ? see link below). We are in the process of updating the Service to programmatically validate certain licensing conditions. Beginning May 6, 2008, if your application is not in compliance with these terms, the Service will no longer return data to your application.

So basically they gave everybody 6 days to fully comply with their terms of service with no way to verify that they were actually being met. 6 days is also obviously nowhere near enough to re-write the forecast routines and re-deploy a full scale application like Winstep Xtreme.

And this gets us to where we are today. I already contacted them by phone and I'm currently waiting for them to call me back. I'm obviously not alone in this (the tech said they were swamped with phone calls) and I have no idea if this can be successfully resolved. Lets hope so.

I just talked to Nick Decker, the author of the popular Sysmetrix application, which was also affected by the problem, and he actually came up with the solution for this mess.

Let me say that I am still SHOCKED by the realization of what is actually going on here.

This is NOT a TOS (Terms of Service) problem. In reality the Weather Channel broke the URL used to access the XML feed on PURPOSE today, thus affecting hundreds of applications and web sites. They do NOT tell you this, however, not even when you call them on the phone, instead making you believe that this is a TOS violation of some kind (which you cannot verify because they do not provide a mechanism for doing so). Of course, their email sent on April 30th states that you should feel free to call their commercial department if your application is not able to abide by the TOS for some reason.

In reality, you can make the XML feed work again simply by removing the '&prod=xoap' part that their SDK says is part of the URL.

Makes me kick myself for not adding a user defined Weather.com URL as I did for METAR.

This means I will now have to pull an all nighter so I have a nice public beta available tomorrow that will solve this problem (and with new features that are still half-implemented!!!). Thank you Weather Channel, I really love you guys for this - not.

Looks like someone on the Weather Channel finally grew some sense as it seems the normal weather forecast feed has been restored.

Let's hope the uproar yesterday a bit all over the net about the sudden loss of weather information has taught them something. My confidence on Weather.com and their XML feed is now very close to zero.

I'm not getting anything but "N/A" still.

Yeah, looks like I jumped the gun.

I think they restored the feed for a little while and then cut it off again - WSX 8.2 was simply giving me the last info it managed to retrieve. Re-starting it caused the weather forecast to show up as N/A again.

There is now a new private beta available in the Beta Discussion Forum section that restores the weather forecast feed. It also features the new icon reflection effect in NeXuS docks, among other fixes and additions.

You can only have access to the Beta Software Discussion forum if you are a registered Winstep Xtreme user. Instructions on how to join HERE.