Customizing Weather Plugin

Adding Your Own City to the HTC Weather Plugin

Unless you're lucky enough to live in one of the world's major cities, it's very likely that you cannot choose your own city from the HTC Touch's weather menu on the Today Screen.

The HTC Home Weather Plug-In only allows you to choose from a couple of cities around the world without any possibilities to change this to your own needs.

But there is help. As this plug-in uses the AccuWeather.com service you can use every city or region of the world for your own HTC Touch's weather forecast. Here's how:

Required Software

In order to proceed you need the following two pieces of software, both freeware and working without any hassles on Windows Mobile 6:

• TotalCommander
  You will need this free file explorer to edit the HTC Touch's Weather Plug-In's XML file.
  
  
• PocketHosts
  Allows you to open a port in order to connect to the AccuWeather server.
  
  

Customizing the Weather Plug-in

Let's say we want to add the city of Bremen in Germany to our HTC Touch Weather Plug-in (this works for every other city as well that can be found at AccuWeather.Com).

• Look up the City of your Choice
  Go to http://www.accuweather.com/ and enter your desired city in the search field called "Local Weather Forecast", in our case: Bremen, Germany.
  
  
  
  After you have clicked yourself to your local weather site, take a look at the browser's address bar and copy the location code from the URL (marked red in the next picture).
  
  
  
  
  
• Edit the XML file
  Now start TotalCommander on your HTC Touch and navigate to your Windows directory. Find the file called "HH_0407_WeatherCities.xml" and change its properties so it can be edited (uncheck read-only tickbox).
  
  
  
  Then, click on "File" - "Edit" and duplicate a line of XML code, preferably in the right alphabetical place. In general, such a line of code contains the following:
  
  <city name="Cityname, COUNTRY" locationcode="LOCATIONCODE_YOU_COPIED_BEFORE"/>
  
  So in our case we would change the entries to this:
  
  <city name="Bremen, DE" locationcode="EUR|DE|GM005|BREMEN"/>
  
  Save the file and reset its properties again to read-only.
  
  

• Open Ports in order to Connect to AccuWeather Server
  Start the PocketHosts application and "Add" a new Port:
  
  Host name: htc.accuweather.com
  IP address: 64.62.158.108
  
  
  
  
  
• Activate the New City in the Weather Plug-in
  Go back to the Today Screen and click on the city name in the weather plugin to see the list of available cities. You should find the newly created city entry. Click on it, make sure you have an internet connection running and everything should now work fine for you.
  
  

Enjoy the sun! :-)