Author Topic: WeatherCat gets a great review  (Read 1769 times)

LesCimes

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WeatherCat gets a great review
« on: July 20, 2016, 04:20:12 PM »
Discovered this article on Six Colors  https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/07/my-weather-station/ in which Jason Snell talks about his weather station. Good read and a nice review of WeatherCat!

Blicj11

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Re: WeatherCat gets a great review
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2016, 05:12:51 PM »
Thanks for posting this Michael. I enjoyed the article and have trusted Jason Snell's opinions for years. However, I seriously disagree with his assertion that his PHP page is more dynamic than what Weather Cat provides out of the box. I think his page looks like it was inspired by WeatherLink.

It was reading MacWorld's How's the Weather articles that lead me to the purchase of my first personal weather station in 2007, a Vantage Pro2. I was so naive  that I paid full price for it directly from Davis. I didn't make the same mistake when I replaced it with a Pro2 Plus a couple of year ago.

I played around with WeatherTracker, LWC and WeatherSnoop for years, but in 2013 I read a post from Steve http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=17584.0 that lead me to WeatherCat. I snooped around on the WC forum for a long time and finally tried the 14-day freebie. I was satisfied after 2 days and purchased a license for version 1. The rest is weather history (at least as far as my back garden is concerned).

Blick


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Re: WeatherCat gets a great review
« Reply #2 on: July 20, 2016, 08:25:38 PM »
He tended to focus on what he was doing, leaving the concept of a review completely lacking. That's important from Stu's point of view, because all of his comments about WC were glowing with praise.

It would have been more interesting if he had done a review of the Vantage Pro2 used with WeatherCat 2. Then he would have taken the time to make his readers aware of the VP2's expansion capability, and more detail concerning all of the work WC 2 does without operator intervention and how well it presents the data.

But, a very interesting read. A great mention for Stu, and for us, greater awareness means greater likelihood that WC 2 will still be around for years to come.

Thanks Les!
 [cheers1]
Herb

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Re: WeatherCat gets a great review
« Reply #3 on: July 20, 2016, 08:44:29 PM »
Quote
I seriously disagree with his assertion that his PHP page is more dynamic than what Weather Cat provides out of the box.
I guess I can't really compare his and what WC offers "out of the box", since I don't think I've ever used that option. On the other hand, the only way I could say his site is "dynamic" is to point out that, technically speaking, it is; the info on it does change without his direct need to do anything. Whether it's better than anyone else's is a judgement call, in my opinion.

I'm not big on spreadsheet displays of pure data, as a matter of fact, I think it is simply boring! [lol] Closest I get is a simple two column display of max/min statistics for today, on the 'home' page and similar displays for yesterday, this week, last week, etc. There is only the data for the commonly reported items; temps, humidity, pressure, wind. I've not had a PWS for much over a year, but I don't plan on having data displaying for all the years I have left on this planet... :o

And then there is the impossibility of viewing vast amounts of data on a mobile phone without wearing off the screen protector from swiping left/right/up/down...  [rolleyes2] "Just the facts, ma'am." [banghead]

Perhaps we can encourage Mr. Snell to get the VP2 by supplying him with some of the places that offer less expensive prices. His email addy is on the six colors About page.

edit: I sent a link to the RainmanWeather.com to Mr. Snell. He replied almost immediately with a "Thanks" as well as a bit more explanation abut the code behind his site.
THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF COUNTRIES
Those that use metric = #1 Measurement system
And the United States = The Banana system


elagache

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Thanks Michael! (Re: WeatherCat gets a great review)
« Reply #4 on: July 20, 2016, 11:44:21 PM »
Thanks Michael for sharing this with us!  [tup]

Cheers, Edouard  [cheers1]