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Frequently Asked Questions

If you are looking for support, write us: support@repkasoft.com
We'll do our best to get back to you within 24 hours.
It might take a bit longer (depending on the question), but we try hard not to keep you waiting longer than 72 hours.

Alternatively you can ask your question in our forum.

Landscapes

Where may I find YoWindow Landscapes?

Short answer: in our Landscape Collection

However, it depends on a kind of landscape you are looking for.
There are three types of YoWindow landscapes.

1. Living landscape.

This is the most impressive kind of a landscape.
The landscape changes along with the weather, season and sunlight.
There are many living objects like smoke, grass and so on.

So far we have made only one living landscape - Village.
Village is included in YoWindow by default.
However, we are working on several new living landscapes.
They are scheduled for the end of Summer 2010.



2. YoWindow landscape made from a regular picture.

A regular picture looks amazing when the sky is replaced with YoWindow living sky.
This is a picture of Rome Colosseum we have found on Flickr.

Original picture

Now look at the same picture inside YoWindow.
Scroll the time to experience different light and weather conditions.

You know what?
You can create a landscape like this yourself.
From your own picture, taken with your camera.
Follow our tutorial explaining how to turn a regular picture into YoWindow landscape.

There are many live-sky landscapes created for YoWindow by our friendly community.
The landscapes are made from real photos taken around the world.
Browse through our Landscape Collection.
We wish you to find the landscape of your dreams :)


3. A picture.

You can open any picture or photo inside YoWindow.
YoWindow will take care of the weather and sunlight.
The picture will be covered by rain, snow or mist depending on the weather.
It will fade-out in the night and fade-in on the sunrise.

Make sure you have picked the right picture.
YoWindow expects the picture to be taken on a sunny day.
If you pick a night scene, it will look dark in the day and very dark in the night.
Try to pick a picture taken when the Sun is shining.

Picture width or height must not exceed 2880 pixels, otherwise YoWindow will not be able to display it.

Try it yourself!
  • Run YoWindow desktop edition
  • Go to main-menu/Landscape/Add...
  • Click "Browse" button to locate a picture on your system.
  • Select a picture
  • Click OK to select the picture as the landscape
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How to install YoWindow Landscape?
Installing a landscape is easy.
Let me explain with an example.

This is one of many posts in our Landscape Collection featuring Colosseum.
Rome, Colosseum post

1. Find a link to colosseum.zip file at the bottom of the post.
2. Download colosseum.zip
3. Unpack colosseum.zip
4. Add colosseum.ywl to YoWindow
  • Run YoWindow (desktop edition)
  • Go to main-menu/Landscape/Add...
  • Click "Browse..." button and then find colosseum.ywl at the place where you have unzipped colosseum.zip
  • Click "OK"

That's it, you should see Colosseum inside YoWindow.

Browse our Landscape Collection for more landscapes.

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The original picture for YoWindow Landscape must be licensed as FREE for commercial use and MODIFICATIONS or PUBLIC DOMAIN. Otherwise we can NOT include the Landscape in YoWindow.
We respect the law.

Where to find the copyright free images on the internet?
We have found these sites for you: top websites with public domain images.

And, of course, you may use your own pictures.

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Weather

Where YoWindow takes the CURRENT weather from?

YoWindow takes the current weather from METAR stations network. There are around 4380 active METAR stations scattered around the world. Most of them are located in airports.

YoWindow picks the closest METAR station to the location you choose. Then the current weather is loaded from this station.

You can find METAR stations near your place on this site.

Now we are looking for a better weather source on the internet. If you know a FREE weather service, let us know. support@repkasoft.com

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Where YoWindow takes the weather FORECAST from?
Weather forecast data are provided by one of the following organizations, depending on selected location and program settings

  • yr.no, the forecast is delivered by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the NRK
  • NWS - National Weather Service

We want to express our unlimited gratitude to yr.no team for giving us the opportunity to use the top quality weather forecasts.

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YoWindow weather widget

How to load my landscape inside the widget?


Follow our tutorial.




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blogpost.com Why my weather widget does not reflect settings (language or temperature units, etc)?

Most likely a part of HTML code is garbled after the widget gets added to the blogpost.com.
By some reason "amp;" text is getting added twice in flashvars parameter value.
This is how the problem usually looks, the redundant characters are highlighted in red: 

<param name="flashvars" value="location_id=gn:3430863&amp;amp;time_format=24;amp;
unit_system=metric&amp;amp;lang=es&amp;amp;background=#FFFFFF"/>

Remove amp; manually to resolve the problem.

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Give me the list of the widget parameters!
.
You have it!
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Personal Weather Station (PWS)

Can YoWindow display the weather provided by my station?

Yes!
If your station model or weather software is in the following list, it's easy.

If your station is not listed, see this question.

Go here to connect YoWindow to your station.

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How can I connect YoWindow to my weather station?

1. Setup your PWS to export weather in YoWindow XML format.

Choose your station model or weather software below and follow the instructions.

If your station is not listed, see this question.

As soon as you have propertly setup your PWS to export YoWindow XML, continue with this guide.

2. Make sure you have the latest YoWindow build installed.
If you don't, please download and install one.
http://www.yowindow.com/download.shtml

3. Connect PWS and your location within YoWindow.

  • Select your home location.
  • Go to Main-Menu/Location/Location Properties...
  • Select "Load weather from personal weather station" check-mark.
    The Weather Station Properties dialog will pop up instantly.
  • Now you have to set the following PWS parameters:
    • Name: the name of your station displayed in YoWindow interface
    • URL: the address of the XML file or PHP script where the weather is exported to, either on your computer or on the Internet.
      This is a mandatory parameter.
      Examples:
      C:\TEMP\yowindow.xml
      http://www.microsoft.com/yowindow/yowindow.xml
    • Update interval: YoWindow loads the weather from the XML file periodically in interval specified by this parameter.
      You may not set Update interval less than 5 minutes.
    • Latitude/Logitude: Your weather station coordinates.
      You don't have to enter the coordinates.
      They are not used by YoWindow at the moment.
  • Click OK to close Weather Station Properties dialog.
  • Take a look at the Inspector. If everything is right, the weather parameters provided by your PWS are highlighted in dark-blue color.

That's it, you have your PWS data inside YoWindow.
Congratulations!

If some weather parameter is not provided by PWS, like precipitation or sky conditions, the corresponding parameter is taken from the closest METAR station.

If you wish, you may turn PWS-provided parameters highlighting off.
Go to Options/Advanced and uncheck "Highlight Weather Station parameters" check-mark.
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How can I connect YoWindow-widget to my PWS?


Follow our tutorial.






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My station model is not supported, what should I do?

Join our forum and learn how to create YoWindow XML file for your station or ask our friendly community for help.

Forum: Personnal Weather Station support

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Troubleshooting

Can I make YoWindow work faster?

Yes, you can!
If you have an old PC, YoWindow may work slow: the animation is not so smooth, the user interface is not so responsive.
These are the tricks to speed up YoWindow.

  • Shrink window size (the greater window area, the slower animation).
  • Decrease full-screen display mode resolution.
    • go to options/Advanced/Display;
    • set "Full screen display mode" to some low resolution.
      For example, 640x480. This makes YoWindow to work much faster in full-screen mode.
  • Alter picture quality.
    • go to Options/Advanced;
    • set Quality parameter to Moderate.
      This option disables clouds animation.
      Running clouds slow down YoWindow very much.
  • Hide foreground grass or disable grass animation
    • go to Main-Menu/View/Landscape Options...
    • Choose General tab
    • Uncheck either Show or Animate checkmark to hide the grass or to disable grass animation correpondingly.
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"Weather expired". Why? How to get rid of this message?

YoWindow takes the weather from the Internet service, which in turn takes the weather from weather stations around the world.

Usually, the weather is delivered to YoWindow in 10 - 40 minutes after the moment it was observed at the station. In a case when the delay exceeds 2 hours, the "Weather expired" warning is displayed. This is a signal that the weather in YoWindow may have nothing to do with the actual weather outside. If there's something wrong with the weather YoWindow lets you know.

There are several causes that may lead to "Weather expired" warning.

1. Weather station (METAR station) is not reliable.

YoWindow takes the current weather from airport (METAR) weather stations. The most closest weather station to the location is picked. However, the weather station may not be a reliable one. For example, it may not provide the weather in the night or on the weekends. Or it may provide the weather in a very long intervals like 4 hours. We are constantly working on exclusion of the unreliable weather stations, but this still maybe the case.

If the weather station is not reliable, please report it, we will exclude it from YoWindow. support@repkasoft.com

Alternatively, you may change the METAR weather station manually by entering ICAO airport code in Location Properties dialog.

You may check if the weather station is reliable.
  • Go to main-menu/Location/Location Properties
    There you will notice "METAR" section along with "Code:" line. There is a "www" link.
  • Click "www" link and the page of the weather station will open.
  • Find "Current weather observation" section.
    In the table, in the first line the age of the weather data displayed.
    Like "The report was made 29 minutes ago, at 04:50 UTC".
    If the age is greater than 2 hours, the weather station is not reliable.

2. Networking problems.

As you may know Internet is not 100% reliable. Sometimes a site does not open because of network problems for a certain period of time.
YoWindow loads the weather over the Internet.
And if the Internet does not work, YoWindow cannot load the weather.
Wait a couple of hours, if the problem still exists, most likely this is not a networking problem.

3. YoWindow version on your system is too old.

Make sure you have the latest YoWindow version installed.
An old version may not load weather automatically on certain systems.
Uninstall YoWindow and then download the latest version from this page:
http://yowindow.com/download.shtml
To find the version and the build number of YoWindow, go main-menu/Help/About

4. Make sure the time on your computer is right

YoWindow goes crazy if the computer time is different from the actual time by 15 minutes or more.

Do not trust the time you see on the Windows clock. It may show you the right time, but if the time-zone is set wrong, the time is wrong!

Follow these steps to make sure the computer time is set right.

5. Something else

If you still keep getting "Weather Expired" warning, this must be a very special case on your system.
Please contact us support@repkasoft.com

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I don't see temperature in the system tray (beside the clock).
Norton Internet Security displays a warning for YoWindow and then deletes it
Most likely YoWindow temperature icon is hidden.
Go to Windows tray icon properties and show YoWindow icon.
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Norton Internet Security displays a warning for YoWindow and then deletes it

I should say, if you have downloaded YoWindow from yowindow.com you can trust it. Norton Internet Security just gives you a warning that it does not know this file.

Because YoWindow is updated so frequently, it is hard for Symantec to speed up to us. In a case Norton does not know anything about new program - new build of YoWindow in this case - it prefers to warn a user with a scary message. Just in case.

Norton Internet Security is suspicious to a new build until 100 members of Norton Community to install it.

This article on Norton Community site explains how to workaround the problem.

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The time is displayed wrong for my place.

YoWindow designed to automatically detect local time for any place in the world. And it does the job pretty good. However, a mistake is still possible since time-zone rules are changing over time by some countries.

But in most cases, the cause of this problem is the wrong time set on computer.

Follow these steps to make sure the computer time is set right.

  • Open Windows time settings. There you will find the time zone set on your computer, like this "(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)". Make sure this is the right time zone for the place where you are now.
  • There you may also find this option: "Automatically adjust clock for Daylight Saving Time". We recommend to set this option checked.
  • Now adjust computer time if it does not match to the actual time at your place.
  • Press OK to apply and exit time settings.

If the computer time is set right, but YoWindow still displays the wrong time for your place, please contact us, we will help. support@repkasoft.com

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