General

Over the past few months, Adobe has really been pulling out all the stops. They’ve been releasing some ridiculously useful and innovative tools and additions to existing software, but their latest offering has dropped my jaw even further!

Introducing Adobe WeatherLab Beta

Adobe WeatherLab Beta

This latest release from Adobe will surely change the way we see the world around us and how we interact with it. Adobe WeatherLab Beta is a the latest addition to Adobe’s impressive line of Adobe AIR-based tools, and it boasts some pretty innovative features!

Adobe WeatherLab Beta allows you to communicate directly with whichever skygod(s) you please via RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) in either XML, AMF or JSON. Adobe WeatherLab Beta boasts an expansive, extensible API for changing the weather in realtime and – most importantly – it integrates with all of the CS4 and upcoming CS5 products.

Finally, you can adjust your environment to suit your specific needs. If you’re more of a sunshine and beer kind of person, simply call the Weather singleton and change it to sunny by using the constant Weather.SUNNY (code samples to follow).

Insiders at Adobe have revealed that they have been working on improving the feature-sets of applications such as Illustrator, Flash Professional, Flash Builder & Flex SDK and Photoshop, but found that these applications were just getting to the stage where no more work could be done on them

“We wanted a new challenge. We had reached a point where we realised that our applications were near perfect, aside from a few bugs, and we needed something to throw at our engineers. Luckily, one of our engineers knew how to rain-dance and this set off a chain reaction of events, all leading up to Adobe WeatherLab Beta“.

Much work has still to be done on this application, but engineers over at Adobe have assured me that any bugs in the system will not cause any universal constants to go out of whack.

When I first heard of this innovative and – let’s face it – ingenious application, I was skeptical. My skepticism was soon lifted when I used the mapping API from Google to pinpoint a parade which I subsequently used Adobe WeatherLab Beta to rain on.

Here’s the code I used:

// Code snippet for changing the weather
 
import com.adobe.weatherlab.Weather;
import com.adobe.weatherlab.Geography;
 
public function changeWeather():void
{
        var weather:Weather = Weather.getInstance();     // get weather singleton
        weather.change(Weather.SUNNY, new Geography(37.433868, -121.884155));      // target weather change
}

To download Adobe WeatherLab Beta, click here.