DigitMemo.com

Make the gadget work in non-English Vista systems and “remember” user settings.

One of the new features in Windows Vista is the Sidebar and Gadgets, which provide a handy and speedy way to retrieve various information without additional efforts. The integrated weather gadget, does look great when it works, however, might become less appealing, even unusable by some [serious] bugs.

The first bug, only appears in non-English systems, or on English Vistas whose “language for non-Unicode programs” option is set to other language. The weather gadget  will display nothing other than “service unavailable”. Being around for quite sometime, Microsoft seems to have no intend to fix it.

Another bug would affect anyone who is not in Redmond–the gadget simply resets the location each time it starts.

To fix the first bug, you’ll need to replace the vanilla weather.js file with a modified one(download). The original weather.js can be found

%ProgramFiles%Windows SidebarGadgetsWeather.Gadgeten-USjs 

Get full control for this file(how) and then replace it with the downloaded one. The gadget should work now regardless the language setting.

The second bug can be work around by setting a new “default” location. Find localizedStrings.js in the same directory, get full access over it, then right click the file, select Edit, this will open the file in notepad, locate the lines shown below:

L_localizedStrings_Text[‘DefaultCity’] = ‘Redmond, WA’;
L_localizedStrings_Text[‘DefaultLocationCode’] = ‘wc:USWA0367′;
L_localizedStrings_Text[‘DefaultUnit’] = ‘Fahrenheit’

Let’s change the new default to Paris(some place outside US, as an example). Navigate to MSN Weather(http://weather.msn.com/) and type “Paris France” in the search box, notice the address bar now shows

http://weather.msn.com/local.aspx?wealocations=wc:FRXX0076

So wc:FRXX0076 is the magic code we need for the 2nd line, the default city in the first line doesn’t matter in fact as the gadget actually resolve the name from the location code, but its never hurt to set it to Paris, FRA as reminder. The last line is unit, and we can choose from Fahrenheit and Celsius. So putting all these together, we have

L_localizedStrings_Text[‘DefaultCity’] = ‘Paris, FRA’;
L_localizedStrings_Text[‘DefaultLocationCode’] = ‘wc:FRXX0076′;
L_localizedStrings_Text[‘DefaultUnit’] = ‘Celsius’;

Save the file, close and reopen the weather gadget, it should show the weather in Paris in the first place.