I currently have an issue with Apple’s Weather Widget in the OS X Yosemite Dashboard not retrieving any city locations anymore. In the course of analyzing the issue, I found some interesting details I want to share here, about what JavaScript function and URL calls the widget makes and where it retrieves it’s data from.
What it does
- The Weather Widget uses a JavaScript function call on the following external (?) function
function validateWeatherLocation (location, callback) { ... } - This function actually calls the following, Apple hosted JavaScript file:
http://www.apple.com/widgets/weatherParser.js - Which in itself calls the following URL…
http://wu.apple.com/adcbin/apple/Apple_find_city.asp?location=
- …that is being redirected to the following URL:
http://apple.accuweather.com/adcbin/apple/Apple_find_city.asp?location= - and ultimately returns an XML response based on the given location string.
Example URL call:
http://apple.accuweather.com/adcbin/apple/Apple_find_city.asp?location=Zurich
Example result for the URL call:
Summing this up with regards to my current issue with the Weather Widget, it could be that my firewall is either disallowing access to one of the external URLs or the calls run into a timeout. Unfortunately I couldn’t identify one or the other of these assumptions so far.
