12.21.06
How’s the Weather?
Two days ago, Nintendo made the Wii Weather Channel available. It’s a pretty nifty little application that lets you explore weather all around the globe, letting you rotate and zoom in and out. Sure, data-wise it’s not anything that you can’t do on weather.com, but it’s a lot more fun to rotate all the way over to the South Pole (it’s pretty cold down there) than to visit a website.
A few minor issues:
No custom locations. Figuring out your latitude and longitude is pretty easy nowadays. Let users enter custom locations. Better yet, do a geo-lookup based on a Wii’s IP address, and show registered friends on the map. As a complete aside, use the geo-lookup in games so that you’ll know you’re playing with people all around the world (right now the only time I think I might be playing someone not from the US is when they have a kanji-filled handle).
Panning/rotating with the ‘A’ button. In the other channels, usually you hold down ‘B’ to pan the view. Switching it to ‘A’ for the weather channel is a bit disconcerting. Overall, I wish the channels had a more consistent look and feel.
No lookup by name. Would love to be able to enter a zip code or place name to get weather reports. This has the added benefit of making me not look stupid when someone asks me for the weather in a particular city and I have no idea of what continent it’s on.
In any case, it’s fun to play around with and didn’t cost anything. Hopefully Nintendo will release other map-related channels, since everyone loves them.
