Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

For the past few years I’ve been trying my best to keep Galleon’s weather app running, but it appears the end-of-life for it has arrived.

Once again, ajayabb on TCF pointed out that the Weather application had stopped working. I hadn’t used it in a while myself, so I tried and sure enough I just got a black screen on my TiVo. I did some debugging and found that the connection to retrieve local weather information from weather.com’s XML feed was returning the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <error>
    <err type="102">Invalid License Key.</err>
  </error>

A few Google searches later, I found this:

Dear Registrant:

We are writing to you because our records indicate that you are a registered user of the weather.com® XML Data Feed (http://xoap.weather.com.)

As a valued subscriber, we want to let you know that our data feed service offerings are changing. Beginning the week of October 10th, 2011, we will be launching a new subscription service, The Weather Channel® API.

…

In order to have access to an XML data feed from The Weather Channel, you will need to subscribe to The Weather Channel® API. This letter serves as formal notice to you that your access to the weather.com® XML Data Feed will terminate at midnight Eastern time on November 15, 2011.

In a nutshell, TWC has discontinued the free XML feed for weather information and moved to a subscription model. No one who currently maintains the Galleon project would have received this e-mail since it was the original developer (Leon Nicholls) who registered for the license. Thus, on November 15 when TWC turned off the XML feed, the app stopped working. A new multi-city subscription costs $68/month (!!) so that effectively kills the free Weather app in Galleon.

Weather Underground has a free developer API but even that has limits that could end up costing someone money. They mention a non-commercial license so if I feel inspired I could try and investigate that and see how much re-coding it would require to get the app functional again. But until then, the Galleon Weather app is dead, sorry. 🙁