Today's press touts mobile connectivity, yet with all of the power that the Pocket PC brings to the palm of your hand, it's still not all that easy to access Internet information using one. For most of the last century, radio and TV have been the only "near real time" source of weather, news and, increasingly, traffic information for commuters. But TV has this tendency to grab your attention and not let go. Consequently, you can waste a lot of time using TV as an information source. I thought that if I could use the Pocket PC to access these types of information, it would save time and help me kick the TV habit, a long-term goal of mine. However, the first time I tried to use the Pocket PC as a real-time information pipeline, I received a lesson in the meaning of the words "connection constraints." It's been an education, and I hope the tricks and tips posted in this article will help you avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered.
My wife and I were doing landscape work in our yard when we heard a radio warning of a strong weather front approaching from the West. Our pickup truck still held a full load of fresh garden soil and I didn't want it to get soaked before we had time to unload and spread it, so it was of immediate importance to know if and when it was going to rain. "Ahha!," I thought. I'll just pull out my HP Jornada Pocket PC and get a timely weather update... and that's where the lesson in connection constraints began.
GO DIRECTLY TO THE WEATHER MAP
Browsing with the full screen view of a desktop monitor and a new perspective, I was immediately struck by the massive amounts of advertising and graphics found on almost every Web page. All this had become endurable on a desktop PC, but it was intolerable garbage when viewed on the Pocket PC's smaller screen, especially when you are using slow Internet dialups or wireless. To make things worse, I realized that even when I used bookmarks, it still required a significant amount of navigation to get to the specific weather views I wanted.
All Web browsers have a feature that lets you save the Web address of a particular page for quick future access. It's called "Bookmarks" in Netscape and "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. A less know fact is that each weather map image on a Web page also has a Web address of its own which is a bit more difficult to find and save as a "Favorite."
I opened the Web browser on my desktop PC and took the time to navigate to each weather site and find the specific radar weather map I wanted. I cut and pasted each link into an e-mail message that I later sent to my Pocket PC. Again, the real trick is getting the Web address of the specific weather map you're interested in, rather than the URL of the page that contains the image. This small trick can save a significant amount of download time. [Note that these Web addresses can be very long, long enough that when pasted into an e-mail message, they may "wrap," breaking the line into two parts making it unusable unless you manually patch it back together again.]
NOAA AND OTHER WEATHER SITES
Most Internet users have their own favorite weather sites. Before my experiment with the Pocket PC, I regularly used Intellicast ( www.Intellicast.com ) plus two local TV station's Doppler Radar Web pages. The Intellicast site proved to be unusable with a Pocket PC, both because of the amount of unnecessary content displayed on it, and its extensive use of Java code, which stopped my Jornada cold. Of my original Web weather resources, I was able to use a single map image URL from the Web page of one of the local TV stations. This was because most of their Web pages used animated GIFs that PIE doesn't display. I went looking for new sites and turned up the NOAA "NexRad" and "GOES" image pages. These are government sites and their image URL's are so complex that I won't bother listing them here. I simply suggest that you go to the main site ( www.noaa.gov/sitemap.html ), search that page for "RADAR" and "GOES," and navigate further from there.
Discovering the NOAA Web site and learning about its resources turned out to be a significant reward of my Web investigations. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a government agency whose mission is to "...describe and predict changes in the Earth's environment, and conserve and wisely manage the Nation's coastal and marine resources."
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