Interested in using National Weather Service Enhanced Radar Loop on your WM device?

Menneisyys · 04-09-07, 08:02 AM

You may have heard of (and even seen!) the National Weather Service Enhanced Radar Loop on your Windows Mobile device, particularly if you’ve visited Beverly Howard’s related link collection. This Radar loop gives a nation-wise (U.S. only) radar image of notable weather conditions and is highly useful and popular.

(WM6 Internet Explorer Mobile screenshots on VGA devices using the CrEme Java plug-in with Use High Resolution enabled.)

In this article, unlike with Beverly Howard’s links (see the “Recommended links” section), I elaborate on making the enhanced (dynamic) version work on Windows Mobile devices. While requiring substantially more resources, it offers a lot of goodies not available in the standard (basic) version, which is a plain animated GIF without any configuration / zoom-in capabilities. For example, with the enhanced version, you can freely en/disable counties / rivers / highways; you can freely zoom in/out etc. I really recommend giving both the standard and the enhanced version a try on your desktop browser to see the differences – you’ll love the enhanced capabilities of the latter. (Let it download and install the Java plug-in if it isn’t already installed.)

I’ve already elaborated on the Windows Mobile (WM for short) compliance of the enhanced Radar applet almost two years ago in my previous, pretty thorough article "Making the National Weather Service Enhanced Radar Loop Java applet work on your Pocket PC" (also cross-posted to MobilitySite, AximSite, BrightHand). In the meantime, however, the applet has been substantially updated (the previous version, for example, didn’t allow for dis/enabling terrain, rivers etc) and its resource needs increased, which, unfortunately, also means it has become incompatible with the majority of the Java-capable Web browsers on WM.

Two years ago, all major Java-capable browsers (Thunderhawk, Access NetFront 3.2 (the, then, current version of the browser)) and the two available WM Pocket Internet Explorer Java plug-ins, Jeode (then, tested with 1.7.1) and CrEme (then 4.0) ran the applet pretty well.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. I’ve given the applet a very thorough try in the following configurations:

WM2003 / WM5 / WM6 + NetFront 3.3 (the last NetFront version commercially available; that is, having a Java plug-in)
WM2003 + NetFront 3.2 (version 3.2 is not compatible with newer WM versions)
WM2003 / WM5 / WM6 + Jeode 1.7.1
WM2003 iPAQ 2210 + Jeode 1.9.1 (couldn’t test it on other, newer devices because it’s locked to the iPAQ brand)
WM5 / WM6 Internet Explorer Mobile + CrEme 4.10 plug-in
The latest Thunderhawk

Of these, it’s only the latter two that still supports the Radar applet; the former three not any more. This is particularly sad with the two NetFront versions, which no longer are able to run the applet.

All in all, if you are a Thunderhawk subscriber or happen to have the CrEme JVM on your WM device, you can still enjoy the vastly enhanced capabilities of the Radar applet.

An important Thunderhawk tip

Thunderhawk, by default, uses a 640*480 zoom, converted to 320*240 on the client (even on VGA devices, unfortunately). This means fine text on images become totally unreadable as can be seen in here and here. Fortunately, with explicitly switching to low-resolution mode inside Thunderhawk, the results become pretty usable, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

Additional remarks & screenshots for geeks & WM gurus

NetFront 3.3: stops at 30-33% on all supported OS’es (WM2003, WM5, WM6) (device.exe and cvm.exe crashes when the dynamic memory is either fully filled in – with devices having less than 31-32M of RAM before starting to load the page or after allocating some 35Mbyte of RAM on devices with more memory). Under the old 3.2 with a WM2003 device having initially less free memory than 35 Mbytes, at least it stated it’s because of the shortage of RAM that it can’t go further. Of course, decreasing the initially 1 Mbyte warning threshold to 0 Mbytes (as is recommended by NetFront) doesn’t help – it just further results in the entire device’s locking up (particularly under WM5, where the free RAM threshold of the system becoming unstable and messed-up is around 1.5 Mbytes).

On the two tested Jeode versions (used with PIE / IEM), it won’t ever stop loading. On a freshly hard reset and, therefore, absolutely clean iPAQ 2210: after allocating some 35M of memory, it didn’t go on; the same stands for NF 3.2 and 3.3 running on WM2003.

Recommended links

Beverly Howard’s link collection, linking to GIF animations.

Windows Mobile Web Browsing Bible - the source of ALL Web Browsing-related information. A MUST read!