4cast version 1.65 Review

Recently, I installed a trial version of 4cast, a weather application for Palm OS devices. 4cast downloads and displays weather information from weather.yahoo.com. It does not alter the information, but extracts the data and displays it in a clear and efficient way, pulling out 5 days worth of forecast information for each of your selected cities, and a lot of extra details (e.g. wind, humidity, text forecast ...) for today's forecast. Yes - you can set 4cast to display all the temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit so you are not forced to use an unfamiliar scale.

4cast, by ShSh Software, is one of those rare applications that you install on your Palm and then forget about. Not because you don't use it, but because you do... daily, seamlessly, almost unconsciously. It just fits. I didn't decide to stop checking the weather on my desktop each morning, I just didn't need to do it because I already had the latest forecast on my Palm thanks to 4cast. For a while, I even enabled the schedule in 4cast so it updated itself via WiFi every 6 hours, as long as it could find a WiFi connection.

The weather update options in 4cast are extremely versatile. You can set it to update the weather information one (or more) of many different ways including: via your phone connection such as GPRS/CDMA (Treo smartphones have this), via WiFi connectivity (like the T|X or with an SD WiFi card), you can use IrDA or Bluetooth to connect to an Internet connected cellular phone or a computer, or you can install the "4cast HotSync Conduit" to have it retrieve weather forecasts on your desktop during every HotSync, and transfer that data to the handheld for 4cast to display. I use the HotSync option the most, because it fits my workflow best. For security reasons, there are no WiFi connections available where I work, so my daily routine includes a HotSync in the morning before I leave for work, and another as soon as I get home, to sync the data I've modified / added during the day. During the evenings and weekends, when ever I'm near a hotspot, I use my Palm T|X WiFi to manually update 4cast and check my e-mail etc.

The 4cast application is 275Kb in size, and uses 325Kb of space (including data) on my Palm T|X running OS 5.4.9 with it configured to track 4 cities (you can select a maximum of 10 cities). 4cast does require an internet connection of some type (see above) in order to download the selected city forecasts from weather.yahoo.com. If I was to complain about any part of 4cast, it would be that it only runs in 320 x 320 mode (in either portrait or landscape) and does not take full advantage of the 320 x 480 resolution of my T|X. But, honestly, I had to fire up 4cast in order to confirm that it didn't use the large resolution... so it is obviously not a major limitation.

One of the really surprising features of 4cast is that while it is a full featured stand-alone application, it can also be used as a plug-in for several other Palm OS applications: 2day, DateBk6 and Zlauncher. You can configure each of these applications to display a line of weather information on their screens by using the information retrieved by 4cast. This additional feature of 4cast really intrigues me, and I will be testing it out from inside of DateBk6 etc. at a later date (soon I hope).

In summary, unless you are one of those few people that never seem to care what the weather is doing, you will want 4cast. You can purchase, or download a trial copy of 4cast here. It's very fairly priced at $11.65 Canadian ($9.95 US) and will quickly integrate itself into your daily routine faster than you will believe possible. Personally, I have no idea where the rest of the trial period went, but I only have 1 day left and I'm sure I'm going to miss it. Since I want to do reviews on each of the above listed plug-in capable applications, I wouldn't be surprised if I end up using them as an excuse to buy 4cast.

Updated: 2006 May 31, Wednesday