Club Amiga de Montreal - CAM/CAM_CD_1.iso/files/296.lha/WeatherGraph.doc

Text File | 1992-09-01 | 5.6 KB | 112 lines

                         WeatherGraph - Documentation

                               Legal Garbage

     WeatherGraph (c) 1988 by Michael Cox, All Rights Reserved. This
     archive may be distributed and used in any way desired and may be
     uploaded to any telecommunications service in the known universe
     except Compuserve.

     This program is hereby placed in the public domain by its author.
     However, if you like it or get some use from it, please send $5 to
     either the American Civil Liberties Union or to your local Humane
     Society.

                             About the Software

     WeatherGraph is a very simple little hack that I threw together over a
     long weekend, ostensibly as a favor to my father-in-law, but actually
     in order to escape from what I SHOULD have been working on. It is
     simply a database for storing up to ten years of weather data and
     displaying the results graphically. Graphs can be overlaid and printed
     out if desired.

     Put Weathergraph in a directory of its own and CD there. Start the
     program by typing RUN WEATHERGRAPH at the CLI. No icon is provided. If
     you want to design your own, knock yourself out.

     When you power up for the first time, you will get a requester asking
     for a starting date. Enter 01-01-XX where XX is the year you want to
     start your data. The disk will be busy about 2 minutes creating the
     ten-year-long data file, stored in the same directory, called
     WeatherData.

     The program is very easy to use. The three colored gadgets labeled
     TEMP, HUMD and PRCP control whether those readings will be shown on
     the next graph to be drawn. Click them and notice that their scales
     appear or disappear to reflect their selection state. Below these are
     two gadgets labeled MORN and EVE. There is a space for morning and
     evening readings in each of the three categories. Note that at least
     one of the three scales, and at least one of the two time-of-day
     gadgets, MUST be selected or your graph will be pretty uninteresting.
     The colors of the gadgets indicate the colors of the data plots.
     Evening readings appear slightly darker than morning. (Also, if your
     timespan covers more than one year, the next year's data changes color
     for clarity.)

     At the very bottom right is a gadget marked SCAL. This chooses between
     the two types of output, a year-long scattergram or a month-long line
     graph.

     Moving back up the screen a little, DRAW is the main graphing command.
     It will ask for a starting date and ending date (in the form MM-DD-YY)
     and draw the graph you've selected. NOTE that it does NOT erase any
     previous graphs that might have been there. This feature allows you to
     overlay graphs of different time periods and see them on the same
     display for comparison.

     REDRAW does exactly the same thing as DRAW but simply uses the last
     dates entered. Thus you could for example call up the morning
     temperatures, look at them, select EVE and REDRAW and see the evening
     temperatures drawn separately.

     CLS clears the display. Note that changing the SCALE also clears the
     display, since it renders any existing displays meaningless.

     PRNT, of course, prints the screen. I suggest having your preferences
     set to reverse printing, smoothing on, integer scaling, with the
     threshhold almost all the way up. This produces really excellent
     results. (Bravo, 1.3 writers!)

     (IMPORTANT: PRNT expects to find GraphicDump in your SYS:System
     directory. I did this for two reasons: one, I wanted this program to
     work under 1.3 and don't have a clue yet about how the new drivers
     work, and two, this was intended to be a quick hack and I was lazy. No
     apologies...)

     The remaining gadget, you will be pleased to learn, allows you to
     enter data so that it can be stored and graphed. EDIT asks for a date
     and opens a window for your data. The meanings of the gadgets in this
     window should be fairly apparent. Temperature and humidity are entered
     as whole numbers, and precipitation can be entered decimally in
     graduations down to a hundredth of an inch. SAVE saves that day's data
     and automatically advances to the next day; use QUIT to get out of
     this window. The left and right arrows simply move you through
     time without saving any changes.

     The last gadget in this window is labeled FAST. This one is for rapid
     entry of large amounts of data. When selected, it selects the data
     entry gadgets in order for you, and automatically saves and advances
     the date after the bottom entry, allowing you to enter a large amount
     of data quickly without using the rodent at all.

     My only suggestion for use is to enter one entire month of data, maybe
     from an almanac or something, and experiment. The first time you
     run this program all your graphs are of course going to be straight
     lines at zero. Including a sample data file would have made this
     archive prohibitively large.

     That's about it. I realize that this isn't the most mind-bogglingly
     useful utility since Lotus, or even Microhost, but it does what it
     does very well, and might be exactly what someone out there is looking
     for. Besides, it was a great way to kill a weekend.

                                   Share and Enjoy.

                                   Michael Cox
                                   SYSOP - Iconoclast BBS [phone]
                                   (Home of the Skyline BBS System)
                                   GENIE - MCOX5