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Weather widget

The weather widget shows the current weather with an icon, the temperature, humidity and wind, next to the date and the time. Beside or below the current weather are the coming days with the lowest and highest temperature. The widget follows your screen: portrait or landscape, the layout adapts. The colours follow the hour of the day or your brand colours. Handy for retail windows, a hospitality menu board, or a reception screen in an office. A quick visual check for whoever walks in.

Adding a weather widget

  1. Open Apps, click Add app at the top right and click Add at Weather.
  2. Search for the place, for example Ghent, Antwerp or Brussels. Choose the unit (°C or °F), the language (Dutch, English or French), the days ahead (1 or 5) and the colours (by time of day or your brand colours), give the app a name and click Save.
  3. Open the playlist, click Add and choose the app under My apps. You can also create a new one straight away under New app.
  4. Set the duration of the block through Edit.

The widget appears in the playlist immediately, with the label of the chosen city. On publish, the player shows the right temperature and condition within 10 seconds.

The weather of each screen

If one playlist runs on screens in different cities, each screen shows the weather of its own place. You no longer need to create a separate playlist per city.

  1. Open Screens.
  2. Click a screen.
  3. Under Place, type a city, for example Bruges.
  4. Click Search.
  5. Do the same for every other screen.
  6. Open Content › Apps, go to My apps and click Edit at the weather app.
  7. Turn on Weather at the screen and click Save.
  8. At the top of the CMS, click Publish X screens.

A screen without a place shows the city of the widget. That is why the widget always needs a city: the switch only works once one is chosen. Unit, language, days ahead and colours always come from the widget.

You can also set the place when you connect a new screen. Type it under Place in the step for name and content and click Search.

The Location field of a screen stays a free description, such as Ghent office. Only Place determines the weather. With Clear you remove the place; after the next publish that screen shows the city of the widget again.

How the data stays fresh

Three layers work together so the screen never shows an empty or outdated weather block:

  1. Background refresh every hour. Every hour we fetch the latest data from Met.no, the Norwegian national weather service. One refresh per hour, shared across all customers with a widget in the same grid of about 11×11 km. That also applies to the place of a screen with Weather at the screen.
  2. On every publish. The moment you click publish, we embed the current weather data in the snapshot of the screen. An offline player therefore keeps showing what it received at the last publish.
  3. An online player refreshes itself. A player with internet polls our cache again every hour and replaces the picture in memory. No republish needed.

If all three fail at the same time (Met.no down and your player down and no recent publish), the player keeps showing what it last saw. It never goes black or shows an error message on the screen.

Changing a weather widget

  1. Open Apps and go to the My apps tab.
  2. Click Edit at the app.
  3. Change the place, the unit, the language, the days ahead, the colours or the name and click Save.

Every block that uses the app follows the change. Publish afterwards. You change the duration of a block in the playlist, through Edit.

What if it does not work

My city is not found

The search uses OpenStreetMap. If you see No place found, try a bigger city nearby, or add the country (Sint-Niklaas, Belgium).

I see 'The place search is not available right now'

No place service answered. That is temporary: try again in a few minutes. Your weather widgets and the places of your screens keep working in the meantime.

The temperature looks wrong

We round the location to about 11 km for cache efficiency. For a city like Brussels or Ghent that always keeps you within the city area, but in a rural area it can sometimes be a few degrees off from what your phone shows. The data itself comes from Met.no and is refreshed every hour.

The screen says 'Loading weather…'

This only happens before the first publish after adding the widget or choosing a new place. At the top of the CMS, click Publish X screens: within 10 seconds the player replaces the skeleton with real data.

Can I have several weather widgets in one playlist?

Yes. For a chain with branches in Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, one widget is usually enough. Turn on Weather at the screen. Give each screen a place. If you want to show the weather of several cities one after another on a single screen, create a widget per city. We automatically share the weather cache between widgets that fall in the same grid (~11 km).

Background information

  • Source: Met.no, Norwegian Meteorological Institute. A free weather service, allowed for commercial use, run by the Norwegian government. Worldwide coverage.
  • Geocoding: Nominatim (OpenStreetMap). If Nominatim does not answer, we search at a second place service with OpenStreetMap data. If that fails too, your browser asks Nominatim itself. Looked up once when you save, not again after that.
  • Icons: Our own set of SVG icons that scales with every browser and every screen size. No external icon CDN is called from the screen.
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