Not a problem, and thanks for the heads up regarding the icon.

Actually it's good this happened: even though Yahoo is currently the very last resort (their feed is only used if both the Weather.com and MSN weather feeds fail), it DOES return sunrise and sunset times, unlike the MSN feed.

Perhaps I should re-evaluate which of the two (MSN or Yahoo) gets used as a last resort. I'll have to spend some time looking at the quantity (and quality) of info that both feeds return.

How about checking the weather every fifteen minutes instead of once an hour? Thanks.

Lol. No way! For two important reasons:

1. Weather info at the source is normally only updated every hour, so there would be no point.

2. Weather connections use bandwidth. It's not yours I am worried about, but the Weather feed providers.

Bandwidth costs money and and we're getting their service for free, so you really don't want to abuse them. Abuse them and they will find a way to cut you off (and rightly so!).

It's a question of scale: there are thousands and thousands of Nexus installations running out there, and they all poll the weather at roughly the same time (even though I intentionally added code to randomly delay the polling for up to one minute, so they do not all poll at exactly the same time!)

For the Weather servers, this must look like a mini-DOS attack that happens every hour.

If I increase the polling rate to 15 minutes, I would also be increasing our usage of THEIR bandwidth by up to four times. And this for data that, most likely than not, is not updated that often.

In the next release I actually added code to cache the weather data for up to an hour to help reduce our usage of their services: multiple weather feed calls for the same location within that time now fetch the data from the local cache instead of hitting the weather servers again.

Just for you to have an idea on what kind of money we are talking about, check out Weather Underground pricing for developers HERE.

Nexus would need their Cumulus Plan to get a weather forecast of at least 5 days. Selecting their top Service Usage plan (Shower) would cost me $400 per month!

And it would not be even remotely enough: their top plan caps usage at 100,000 calls per day. Since Nexus is the type of application that is running 24/24 and makes hourly calls (so 24 calls per day per copy of Nexus running) their TOP plan would only cater for roughly 4,000 to 5,000 Nexus users before becoming exhausted.

I don't exactly know how many Nexus users are out there, but I estimate that number to be many, many, many times higher than 5,000.

You learn something new every day.

People usually have no idea how much bandwidth costs. And they have no idea how much bandwidth a popular web site uses simply because of scale either.

Those free versions of Nexus all have a cost which Winstep has to support. The only reason Winstep is able to afford it is because the paid versions subsidize that cost in part and because Cnet's Download.com carries the brunt of the load in hosting the full setup files. Winstep still has to host update files, downloads of the full versions from external sources, some themes, animated icons, voice packs, the forums, general web site usage, etc...

Each copy of Nexus free is a 32 MB file. Nexus is currently getting about 6,500 downloads *per week* at Download.com (I'm not even counting other download sites that also host Nexus, such as Softonic, etc..) That's 26,000 downloads per month of a 32 MB setup file, which adds up to 832,000 MB of bandwidth usage per month. Whenever there is a new release, weekly downloads at Cnet increase to about 32,000 downloads *per week*. That's 4,096,000 MB (yep, four terabytes) of bandwidth usage in a single month for the *free* version of Nexus only - bandwidth usage that somebody has to pay for.

When v14.11 was released, bandwidth usage (in a premium Amazon AWS server!) for that month at Winstep.net jumped to 5 TB - and Winstep was only hosting the *update* files.

There is a reason my hair curls every time someone claims 'software should be free!' and 'software piracy is not stealing!' lol. Easy to say when you're not the one paying the bills.

Weather Monitor Settings is blank. It seems to be working okay but if I want to check another city I'm not able to.

Screenshot, please.

Also, have you tried re-starting Winstep Xtreme? If that doesn't fix it, the only way I can see something like this happening is the text file containing all the Weather locations and codes becoming corrupted.

Did you change it manually? Did you change locations or used the 'Get My Location' GEO IP auto-location method recently?

Anyway, so not to waste time, besides that screenshot can you also please send me your METARWCOMData.txt file which you should find in

C:\Users\Public\Documents\WinStep\Weather\

to the Winstep support address?