A command-line weather app built using Elixir

https://github.com/tacticiankerala/elixir-weather

37 64 11 years ago

davidw• 11 years ago

If you like the ascii characters like that, you might also enjoy figlet: http://www.figlet.org/

bshimmin• 11 years ago

You beat me to it, so I'll just add that figlet in combination with the inestimable cowsay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay) produces excellent results.

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

I am aware of figlet but, this project was created while learning Elixir and I wanted to do it myself :)

renekooi• 11 years ago

Another ASCII art weather (forecast) utility, but in Go: https://github.com/schachmat/wego

flaie• 11 years ago

This is much much better. Closer to "beautiful" than the one featured here.

lectrick2• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's beautiful if

1) you think mutable variables are beautiful

2) you think stuffing everything into one file is beautiful

3) you think defining functions at the root namespace is beautiful

4) you think consecutive repeated property accesses stuffed into a consecutively repeating boolean check like this are beautiful: if h.Time == "0" || h.Time == "100" || h.Time == "200" || h.Time == "300" || h.Time == "400" || h.Time == "500" || h.Time == "600" || h.Time == "700" || h.Time == "1400" || h.Time == "1500" || h.Time == "1600" || h.Time == "2300"

5) if you think embedding ANSI color codes across all strings instead of centralizing all that ugliness somewhere is beautiful

6) if you think not separating your command-line-handling code from your problem-modeling code is beautiful (see: Hexagonal Architecture http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture)

7) If you think having no fucking test suite to speak of, given all that mangled mutating code is beautiful (to me this is the MOST egregious non-beautiful thing in the entire "project")

Then, yes. WeGo is beautiful.

Frankly I'm shocked that what people call "beautiful" can differ that fucking much.

djm_• 11 years ago

Can anyone explain why a dependency of this app is a "working Go environment"? I thought one of golang's selling points was the fact that it created a simple binary.

As far as I can tell, the Go environment is simply being used as a cheap installer, is that correct?

laumars4• 11 years ago

Because he's sharing the source code rather than a compiled binary. It's no different to having make + gcc listed as a dependency for C++ code.

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

In my opinion its more like: Go comes with a package-management/install system onboard, and for every 'go install', there's a full copy of working sources which someone, some day, might consider reading and contributing to ..

So I think, at least as a go newbie, that its quite handy that pretty much every tool I might be interested in - because it was written in Go - comes with full sources onboard as a basic, starting-gate, expectation. At least, I am quite happy to be learning Go this way ..

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

Thanks, wego is very beautiful and quite useful!

iamcurious2• 11 years ago

Unlike the main post, this is a good use of ASCII art. i.e. to show a drawing/symbol not to make numbers more difficult to parse...

ZenSwordArts• 11 years ago

Wow thanks for sharing.. this is really is beautiful!

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

That's really mind blowing! Thanks for sharing this.

jalada• 11 years ago

Interesting describing ASCII art as 'beautiful'. You can tell this isn't Designer News :P

baldfat2• 11 years ago

I son't know but I love ncurses software and find the actual UI "beautiful since it gets me the information quickly and quickly lets me get things done.

I find my wee-chat with 256 color urxvt with Source Code Pro font in Light Solarized to be the best looking IRC client ever :)

feld2• 11 years ago

this isn't even ncurses, it's just stdout

iamcurious2• 11 years ago

Outputting numbers as ASCII art is not beautiful. Can't parse it, can't pipe it, doesn't deserve to be in the command line.

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

LOL!

nodata• 11 years ago

It's nice, but it's not beautiful. Let's stop calling everything beautiful.

teh_klev• 11 years ago

...and "awesome".

baldfat2• 11 years ago

I have used weather an old command line utility for years.

http://fungi.yuggoth.org/weather/

Pretty cool to track the temperature with your own home temperature.

techdragon• 11 years ago

I'm going to be honest... This is an ugly looking pig of a command line tool. The giant ascii art looks bad and does nothing for its usefulness or usability.

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

I am sorry for that. It was a hobby project of mine when learning Elixir and I got excited about it.

masukomi• 11 years ago

I've got nothing against it. it's a fun little hobby app, but yeah, I've got to agree with the commenter above this is FAR from any standard definition of a "beautiful" app.

zaargy• 11 years ago

curl 'http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=london&mode... &>/dev/null | jgrep -s main.temp | figlet

Put this in a function. Done.

Gist here since copying and pasting above didn't work. https://gist.github.com/zaargy/384889cb44960e8559d5

feld2• 11 years ago

My first thought was "pipe into figlet, done."

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

That's a good one!

anc84• 11 years ago

Temperature accurate to three decimals? That's kinda silly. It would be more useful to display the "felt temperature".

tormeh• 11 years ago

As well as, you know, the weather? Like temperature is an important part of weather, but it's often not even the most important one.

azurelogic• 11 years ago

I'm excited about this not because I want to use it, but because it is a great example of an Elixir app. I'm in the process of learning Elixir, and it was cool to see someone else's code and be able to make sense of most of it. Thanks for posting this!

ajanuary• 11 years ago

I don't know Elixir, but it does some questionable things. For instance, it appears to read and process the entire ascii_chars.txt file for each character in the output. It's not a big file, but it wouldn't be difficult to read it once.

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

I thought of that but for a starter I didn't want to optimise too much. But still it's a good suggestion and I will apply "boy scout rule" for sure!

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

I know :). I am learning Elixir as well! Glad that you liked it :)

rnhmjoj3• 11 years ago

  function weather(){curl -s "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=$1&units=metric" | jq .main.temp | figlet -kcf big}

  $ weather london
                            __  _  _     ___   _____
                           /_ || || |   |__ \ | ____|
                            | || || |_     ) || |__
                            | ||__   _|   / / |___ \
                            | |   | | _  / /_  ___) |
                            |_|   |_|(_)|____||____/

q3k• 11 years ago

But that's not web-scale and written in a functional language!

gknoy2• 11 years ago

Perhaps I'm a bash noob, but when I try to paste that in my shell, it complains about a syntax error near `{curl`. Am I doing something wrong?

cocoflunchy• 11 years ago

There are spacing issues for me. Try

    function weather() { curl -s "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=$1&units=metric" | jq .main.temp | figlet -kcf big ;}

rnhmjoj3• 11 years ago

I wrote this in zsh. It seems in bash you need to add a space before the bracket

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

May be you should post a gist. The line is getting truncated.

rnhmjoj3• 11 years ago

It should scroll horizontally.

taternuts• 11 years ago

Cool! for fahrenheit you can change the units to imperial

  function weather(){curl -s "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=$1&units=imperial" | jq .main.temp | figlet -kcf big}

lmorris84• 11 years ago

Should be called "temperature" rather than "weather". 21 degrees and...raining? sunny? any cloud?

Wouldn't call it beautiful - the ascii art is really distracting.

jbverschoor• 11 years ago

Does not work (osx):

  ~/tmp/elixir-weather $ ./weather  Amsterdam

  =INFO REPORT==== 7-May-2015::16:37:56 ===
      application: elixir
      exited: {bad_return,
                  {{elixir,start,[normal,[]]},
                   {'EXIT',
                       {{badmatch,{error,enotsup}},
                        [{elixir,start,2,[{file,"src/elixir.erl"},{line,34}]},
                         {application_master,start_it_old,4,
                             [{file,"application_master.erl"},{line,272}]}]}}}}
      type: temporary
  Failed to start Elixir.
  error: {error,
             {elixir,
                 {bad_return,
                     {{elixir,start,[normal,[]]},
                      {'EXIT',
                          {{badmatch,{error,enotsup}},
                           [{elixir,start,2,[{file,"src/elixir.erl"},{line,34}]},
                            {application_master,start_it_old,4,
                                [{file,"application_master.erl"},
                                 {line,272}]}]}}}}}}

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

I will look into this issue. Thanks for reporting :)

grimmdude• 11 years ago

http://weather.com/

jhwhite2• 11 years ago

Ya know, I was just thinking about doing something like this just a couple of days ago, but instead I wrote a python script to get the weather from forecast.io api, then brought that into my tmux status bar.

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

That's great! would be nice if yo could share the source as well.

jhwhite2• 11 years ago

Ask and you shall receive! I'm very much a beginner developer so any feedback would be appreciated.

https://gist.github.com/jhwhite/2df093eff1f9bab74144

erikb• 11 years ago

That's not the weather, that's the temperature. But I like the effort put into making interesting little tools!

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

yeah.. that's true, it's just shows temperature.

Btw, Thanks for your kind words!

_qbjt• 11 years ago

I'm sorry if this comes across as negative, but this is an example of using the wrong tool for the job, IMO.

I love Erlang and Elixir because BEAM gives me easy concurrency, metaprogramming and best of all, fault tolerance via supervisors. For a service that I need to stay alive, this is great. For a simple command line utility, I'd lean more toward a compiled language like Go, Haskell, Common Lisp, etc.

tacticiankerala14• 11 years ago

I completely understand your point. This is a project I created while learning Elixir.

A command-line weather app built using Elixir

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