Customization: Weather Icons |
After you have customized the templates you may decide that its time to give those weather icons a face lift. The specifications for updating the icons isn't that hard, you will need graphic software, such as Paint Shop Pro, to develop new ones. Also, HAMweather provides custom design services which may be of use as well.
There are two sets of icons for possible customization. The main set that HAMweather uses are the icons you see when obtaining zone forecasts and hourly observations. There is a second set of weather icons that are used by HAMweather Pro . These are the small weather icons that HAMweather Pro uses in the dynamically generated national summary and forecast maps. Since both of these sets have different specifications, instructions for modifying each have been separated into two categories, HAMweather icons and HAMweather Pro icons.
Customization : HAMweather Icons |
The standard HAMweather Icons are the easiest to customize for they have the least specifications. The default graphics that come with HAMweather are 256 color gifs with a width of 55 pixels and a height of 58 pixels. The graphics that you develop can be of any type or size, but you should keep the goal of a small file size in mind to speed downloads.
The are several weather types that you design graphics for. Actually many of the weather types use the same icons. HAMweather allows you to define different weather icons to use for night forecasts. Again, the night icons can use the same graphics used else where. The HAMweather web administration allows you to define what icons to use, both day and night for each forecast type.
Below is a table of the default weather types and their corresponding day & night time weather icons.
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Customization : HAMweather Pro Icons |
The next set of icons are the the HAMweather Pro weather icons. These images are the ones used on the National Forecast and Summary maps. When you customize these there are a few specifications that you must follow:
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Following is a table of the HAMweather Pro Icons. You will notice that this list is a bit smaller than the standard icons and also currently only one set of icons are supported. That means day and night use the same icons. The feature of night icons may be added in the future for the National Summary, so you may want to go ahead and create some night icons. Also you can set the icons to corresponding weather conditions using the HAMweather web administration.
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