News

June 14, 2008:	Seasonality 1.5.1 is ready. This is just a minor update to fix a problem some users were experiencing with forecasts for U.S. locations. Get it while it's hot!
December 3, 2007:	TidBITS has opened voting for their annual gift guide. This year, Seasonality is an entry under the "Other Software" category. Check out the survey and vote for Seasonality and your other favorite products!
November 15, 2007:	Seasonality 1.5 is now available. This release is fully compatible with Leopard, contains thousands of updates to the location database, and several other new features and bug fixes. This is a free update for all users. Hit the download page to update your copy.
August 31, 2007:	Spent some time working on the international forecast server today. I fixed a problem with the precipitation forecast. Before the forecast often showed a chance of rain when there was even 1mm of forecasted rainfall. When models show precipitation amounts that small, the chance of rain is almost nil, so I've now removed that as an anomaly in the model output. I also adjusted what would constitute a drizzle, light rain, moderate rain, and heavy rain. Hopefully you'll see a more accurate representation of the precipitation intensity from here on out as well. Since these updates were on the forecast server, there is no need to update Seasonality to see these changes. Just reload your weather data and you'll see the newest forecasts.
August 23, 2007:	I've been posting Seasonality-specific updates here for quite some time, and will continue to post key updates and changes here. But I thought it was time to start something new. This feed has a implicit limit to short status updates, since it's part of the Seasonality website. However, I want to be able to communicate with you about in-depth issues I run into while developing a piece of weather software like Seasonality. Enter a new site I created called "A Weather Developer's Journey." In the coming months, I'll be posting articles at this new site talking more in-depth about the issues I run into while developing Seasonality. If you're interested, please visit www.weatherdeveloper.com and subscribe to the RSS feed.
July 31, 2007:	You may have noticed that the international forecasts haven't updated for the past few days. In cases like this, you'll notice a 4 or 5 day forecast instead of the full 7 day forecast. I just discovered the issue (with timing) here and have corrected it in the code. The forecast update is currently running and updates should be available within the next hour or so. Next month I will be working on improving the accuracy of international forecasts for coastal locations. There's an issue with large bodies of water giving coastal locations a trend toward more mild weather when that shouldn't be the case in all situations. I'll post an update here when these changes are complete.
May 25, 2007:	I'm happy to report that after being in the works for almost 5 months, a couple of days ago I moved the Gaucho Software Forecast Server to a colocation datacenter. This server hosts the international forecasts for Seasonality. The move should speed things up dramatically, as well as significantly improving the reliability of the international forecasts. This move also brings with it the addition of an alternate download link. If you are having trouble downloading Seasonality from the primary download site, give the alternate link a try.
March 21, 2007:	Seasonality has been updated to version 1.4.1. This update contains bug fixes and documentation updates. Check the Release Notes for more details.
February 22, 2007:	If you noticed missing international forecasts off and on for the past hour, this was caused by a server update I performed. The forecast server software update is complete and the forecast should be back online. At the moment, the primary high resolution feed has been offline since yesterday. Right now a lower resolution backup forecast is enabled. The NOAA is expecting the high resolution data feeds to be back online tomorrow. I will be looking into adding another forecast server in the next few months to cover times when the primary forecast server goes offline. The tricky part is finding a hosting provider that is cost-effective and can handle the CPU load requirement of the forecast generation code.
February 20, 2007:	I just updated some of the international forecast generation code. International users should notice more accurate forecasts now. If you have found a location where the forecast is worse than it has been in the past, please let me know. I'll be continuing work on the forecast generator during the next few weeks and hope to improve international forecasts even further.
December 14, 2006:	The final version of Seasonality 1.4 is ready! Seasonality 1.4 includes several new features like custom location support, weather journal improvements, moon information, support for mouse/trackpad scrolling, and several speed and stability improvements.
October 18, 2006:	The high-resolution GFS forecast hosted on the NOAA servers came back online last night. This afternoon I switched the Seasonality forecast server to use that dataset again, so you should see the more accurate international forecasts now.
October 8, 2006:	This week (October 8-15), the NOAA is migrating a lot of their services to a new supercomputer. Unfortunately, the 0.5 degree high-resolution GFS forecast model that Seasonality uses for forecasts outside the U.S. is one of the services included in the migration, so it will be unavailable this week. I've written some backup code to gather data from a lower resolution (1 degree) GFS model sourced from a different division of the NOAA for the time being. The daily collection that ran this morning at 9AM UTC went through fine, so sometime tomorrow I will switch the Seasonality forecast server to use the backup data. Forecasts should show up as usual in Seasonality, but you may notice less accurate forecasts while using the lower resolution data.
September 5, 2006:	Seasonality 1.4b1 public beta is now available. This version has an implementation of the new GFS forecast, which provides forecasts for locations worldwide. If you are using Seasonality outside the U.S. or Canada, this is the version you want. This release also has a new moonrise/moonset ring and displays the moon phase.
July 11, 2006:	Seasonality 1.3.2 released. This version adapts to an HTML change on the Environment Canada website keeping all international forecasts from updating correctly. This release also fixes a few localization issues and updates weather locations in Mexico, Germany, and Switzerland.
June 27, 2006:	Seasonality 1.3.1 released. This version accomidates for a change in the National Weather Service forecast feed. On June 26th, the NWS changed the XML describing appropriate icons to show in U.S. forecasts. The NWS change caused Seasonality 1.3 to show "not available" icons for forecast periods where precipitation was possible. Download the update here.
June 2, 2006:	Seasonality 1.3 is ready! Seasonality is now a Universal Binary. New features include a weather journal, a new radar image overlay for the U.S., and a brand new graph interface. In additional to these and other features, Sesonality 1.3 also fixes quite a few bugs and has several performance optimizations.
March 20, 2006:	A Seasonality Universal Binary release is getting closer. An alpha version of Seasonality is running natively on Intel machines, and beta testing will begin sometime in the next week. If you have an Intel Mac and you are interested in beta testing this release, send an email to info-at-gauchosoft-dot-com.
January 25, 2006:	Seasonality 1.2 released! This version adds localization support with a French language translation, a new activity window, and a scrollable forecast view along with other new features and several bug fixes.
November 3, 2005:	Seasonality 1.1.1 update released. This fixes some bugs found in version 1.1. Lots of locations have been updated with correct longitude/latitudes and time zones. The location database is still a work in progress, so let me know if you find any cities that are marked incorrectly on the satellite map.
October 15, 2005:	I just fixed a bug on the server hosting the satellite images. Previously there was a possibility that the satellite cloud image would be downloaded to the server and split into tiles incorrectly, so Seasonality wouldn't show any clouds. This should now be more reliable.
October 11, 2005:	Seasonality 1.1 released! This is a big update with too many changes to list here (See the release notes). The primary new feature is international support. Check it out!
September 22, 2005:	Seasonality 1.0.3 released. The National Weather Service moved their forecast web script to a different URL, this version will automatically load forecast data from the new location.