…weather. DesktopX weather. The end of DesktopX is a topic for another day.

So, it seems the current weather feed—you know, the one which replaced the The Weather Channel feed because TWC moved to a license-based system—will be deprecated. Weather Underground is also moving to a license-and-fee-based system. It will affect some of the more recent weather widgets and gadgets in the DesktopX galleries. When will the current feed no longer be available? Dunno. Perhaps, it will coincide with the end of the world this December.

For now, it’s still functioning, but there are already features that are no longer supported, such as location search & search results (when you don’t know the name or code for the location, or when there are multiple locations with the same name.)

Are there any other weather provider alternatives? Looking into it (likely for the last time.)

More importantly, is there a point to finding another weather provider? Clearly, the market has spoken. Weather providers have decided the free service business model is unsustainable, considering having to keep up with the sheer volume of traffic. Find another service, and once use of their feed spikes, they, too, will adpot a fee-and-license-based system to manage the onslaught.

So, unless you’re a company that can afford and manage a license, like Stardock vis a vis AccuWeather, the days of free-range, customized desktop weather are coming to a close. And, really, mobile computing is putting most desktop applications out to pasture, anyways.  

This has been your heads-up.   (<--not really how I looked when I found out.)