[Charly0902]

Finally got Weatherpanel to look good on HD2!

Firstly can I just say that NONE of this is my own work – all credits must go to Marsware (Weatherpanel), Storyr and Rbecker over at PCCGeeks for the theme and icons and Chi-Tai for Second Today.
However it has taken me three days of looking for solutions to finally get WeatherPanel to work and look good on my HD2. So I thought I would share with you how it was done!

Basically, fed up with the lack of information on the Sense weather tab I was looking for a way to click on the weather section of the Home tab and be taken to a much better weather app than the weather tab. Cookies Home Tab obviously offers the ability to select applications to shortcut to from the various Home Tab elements so the click through bit was already taken care of.

Then cam choosing the app, and I tried everything out there - gWeather, GPS Weather Radar, TouchWeather, etc but none of them provided everything I was looking for. Then I found a thread in XDA - http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=563150 - which looked very promising but which ultimately leeds to the creation of a new Sense tab, which obviously you can't access by clicking on the weather panel in Home tab (without finding and editing Manila paths which I am far too thick to do!). However looking through the thread I managed to ascertain that the weather app element is a home screen plugin called WeatherPanel which turns out to have quite a following (duh!).

I then found another post in the thread which led me to Second Today as an alternative solution to ManilaTodayPage to create a home for WeatherPanel. You can then tag Second Today as the weather app in CHT Editor.

Only problem then was there were absolutely no WVGA themes for WeatherPanel anywhere, plenty of VGA but they obviously leave a large gap at the bottom of the Second Today screen where there are no graphics. BUT...after hours of searching I finally came across an altered version of one of Storyr's PhatPhinger themes here - http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showpost.p...&postcount=300 - and that provided the layout I needed to fill the screen.

Then it was down to icon sets and I wanted the page to look as close to Sense weather as possible so again with some hunting around I found an HTC VGA icons set here - http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showpost.p...17&postcount=4 - only problem now was that once it was all up and running I found there were no huge icons showing on the main screen. A bit more searching after I found the WVGA theme and I finally came across the solution here - http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showpost.p...&postcount=305 - thanks again Rbecker!

Put it all together and what you see above is what you get! It works perfectly, looks brilliant, and now that I have (through blundering trial and error and many soft resets!) got it working here is exactly what you need to do:

1. Download everything from the bottom of this post, and from the second and third posts (icon files)
2. Unzip the 3 zip files
3. Move all of the icons out of the Huger(2) folder and into the Huger folder leaving you with just one folder with all of the icons in it (zip file of the complete folder was too big to upload on XDA). Then more the 'Huger' folder into the 'HTC VGA Icons' folder
4. Install the WeatherPanel cab on your storage card (you can put it in main memory if you like but the icon files will need to go there too and it is a big folder - it runs perfectly well from the SD card)
5. When the WP cab finishes intalling it runs through an extract process and will probably leave you with a WP window asking you to select language (default is English). Select your language then press your hardware back key. Then you can click OK as normal after a cab install.
6. Install the Second Today cab - this will install automatically on the device.
7. SOFT RESET
8. Using your task manager you now need to copy the unzipped PhatPhinger IV Altered folder into the Weatherpanel Themes folder (Storage Card>Program Files>Marsware>Weatherpanel>Themes. Then copy the HTC VGA Icons folder into the Weatherpanel Icons folder. Copy the whole folder in each instance, not just the files or it won’t work. Once you’ve done this you can exit task manager.
9. Open your start menu and then open the Second Today folder. Click on Second Today (NOT Settings). This first run will open the Second Today Settings. On the Plugins tab ONLY check the box beside WeatherPanel. You can then select any background image as normal at the bottom of this window (Use custom background). Then select the Settings tab and delete the word Start in the Window-Title box. Leave everything else as it is and click the right softkey to confirm. This will then open the Second Home window.
10. Weather Panel will then configure. You then need to add your cities (NOTE - WP does not utilise My Location so you have to manually enter locations you want weather info for) which is just a case of clicking Add New, then entering your city name in the Search For box. Once you’ve added each new city you then need to add weather images for each city (if you want weather maps to show up). If all your cities are in the same part of the world (i.e. Europe) then you just need to add the same image(s) for each city. I’m in the UK so all my cities use the same Europe maps. Once you’ve added all your cities and images click on the Display tab. In the Theme dropdown select PhatPhinger IV Altered. In the Layout dropdown select Phat+265.wpl – this is really important as this is the layout file for 480x800. In the Icon Set dropdown select HTC VGA Icons. Once you’ve done this then click your hardware back key and you should then see the main WP display for the first city in your list. The up/down arrows at the bottom of the screen let you scroll through your cities. To exit the WP screen back to wherever you were simply click the right softkey (green tick on my screenshots).
11. Finally for me was to open CHT Editor>Applications and select Second Today as the weather app. Now when I click on the weather pane in CHT it takes me straight to the main WP screen – Job done

If you are in Europe then you can download the attached radar.txt file and overwrite the one in the Weatherpanel folder on your storage card as it contains several more Europe radar image URLs.

Hope this walkthrough helps anyone else out there as thick as me to get there a lot quicker than I did! Now I have four questions for the clever people out there to do with things that would make it better but which I have no chance of finding a solution to on my own:

1. You’ll notice from my screenshots that when you leave the main WP screen to one of the other screens the very top of the WP home page text is just visible above the top bar – how do you move the top bar up a few pixels to hide this?
2. Is there any way of making WP work with My Location so when you switch to it it does the same a Sense and automatically downloads information for where you are?
3. Is there anyone who is clever enough to extract the Sense weather animations to add to the icons folder so we can have the same animations in WP, or at least to extract the large static weather images from Sense as the ones in the Huger folder aren’t brilliantly sharp?
4. Does anyone know of a WP add-in that gives you a morning/midday/afternoon/evening forecast (like gWeather) when you click on a particular day? This version gives you a day summary and overnight summary but I would really like a better breakdown.

Any questions/suggestions please feel free to join in – we can only make it better!

Descarga

AQUÍ

Contenido
WeatherPanel_2010.CAB (2.43 MB, 55 views) SecondToday.CAB (35.4 KB, 48 views) PhatPhinger IV Altered.zip (711.9 KB, 55 views) radars.txt (6.8 KB, 39 views)