Weather Forecast on iCal

Okay, just to warn, this a 100% geek post.

I was reading my RSS feeds today to catch up on the news and I came across this really interesting program called Weather Cal that puts the weather forecast on your iCal with these cool little icons that show what the weather is.

Neat huh?

So, I began to wonder… how do they actually get that little icon in the calendar?  It has to be some kind of a character that is supported by unicode (the standard that correlates a character like ‘a’ to the number ’97′, as well as Chinese characters and all that).  I went looking and did find it in unicode.  So for example, here are a few for weather (using two different fonts to show you that each font will display something different):

Now, being as cheap as I am, I was wondering if I could get around paying the stupid $10 to get the program that actually does this for you.  The answer, really, is yes… but I don’t have THAT much time to waste.  Basically, if you go to the page for http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Yosemite_National_Park.html, you will find a little icon.  If you right click on that icon and copy the link/URL, go into your iCal program (or some Microsoft rip-off), go into the “Calendar” menu and select “Subscribe”, and paste the URL into the field, you will effectively get the same thing (sans icons).

If you really want to have the little icons, well, find a nice programmer who has spare time on their hands to write a simple parser for you that will find the strings like “sunny,” “cloudy,” etc., and prepend the little sun icon or cloud icon.  However, if you are REALLY going to do that, might as well pay the stupid $10.

UPDATE: Upon further investigation, somebody actually did it for FREE!  Check out http://www.smashin.com/weather.

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