NeutralAxis

[Update 07/18/09: Weather information is working again.  I presume weather.com didn't change things back, so I'm guessing Irritrol was working as a middleman taking weather.com info and packaging it for their program when it calls back to HQ.  Originally I had thought the program contacted weather.com directly but it looks like that's not the case.  As long as Irritrol is around and supporting this program, that should mean the program can always access the data with the exception of short windows around when weather.com changes their system.  That was a smart design decision.]

[Original post]  Irritrol’s PC Control lawn irrigation system software, which I reviewed in an earlier post, is now broken due to a change made by weather.com.  Software version 1.0.43, the current version, is no longer able to check the upcoming forecast to determine settings for its weather advisor.  Schedules can still be set manually.  Comments on Irritrol’s user forum show that they’ve been expecting to release an update to their software for quite some time with no results yet.  This article written about a student program at Michigan State University describes  a prototype new version dating back to January 2008.

The areas of improvement that Toro [owner of Irritrol] is looking to explore in the existing software are the following. The interface is not very user friendly, the application runs slowly and communication with the remote is unreliable, at best.

The new application is targeted specifically for Windows, both XP and Vista. The new application will take advantage of graphical tools newly available with Windows Vista. To improve communication with the remote, the software will directly interact with the operating system.

The new software is developed using Microsoft’s .NET Framework, and is written in C#. The user interface is created using Windows Presentation Foundation, with Microsoft Expression Blend facilitating the development process.

The article provides the screenshot and video repeated here.

Prototype PC Control Video (wmv, 108mb, 13min) (Will play in Firefox, but requires ActiveX or there will be no video playback controls)