A Replacement Weather Tile for the Microsoft Band
I’ve been a (mostly) proud owner of a Microsoft Band 2 for several months now, but the biggest pain in my neck has been the fact that the weather tile on the Band just does not want to cooperate with iOS. After weeks of the Band being convinced I was located in Phoenix (hint: I’m not), I decided to try my hand at making my web tile to replace the one that comes with the Band. I decided to use data from WeatherUnderground, both because I found it easy to use and because I actually use their forecasts and alerts regularly.
Now, a disclaimer:
I’m not a coder. I can all but guarantee that the code I’ve written is not the most efficient, beautiful, or perhaps even functional. But for my purposes, it gets the job done. Also, webtiles have some very clear limitations. They depend on the Microsoft Health app to push data to them, so they’ll only update at a set frequency (as much as every 30 minutes) and require the app to actually be running in the background to get any new data at all. This means that if your band hasn’t synced lately, your weather data will be out of date (most important for the current weather). This also means you’ll have to keep the Bluetooth on your phone active to ensure the sync can occur regularly.
Get the Weather Tile for Your Band
Download the .zip file
Don’t forget to save it in a place where you’ll be able to find and open it.
Get a WeatherUnderground API Key
Sign up for an API Key from WeatherUnderground here. Choose “Stratus Plan” and “Developer”. It’s free, and assuming you don’t share your key with the entire neighborhood, it should be more than enough for your individual needs.
Add Your Key to the Webtile
Extract the contents of WeatherTile.zip and then open manifest.json in a text editor of your choice. If you scroll down to “resources”, you’ll find a URL that starts with http://api.wunderground.com. If you keep reading, you’ll find a part in the URL that says INSERTYOURAPIKEYHERE. Copy your key from WeatherUnderground and paste it in place of that text. Don’t forget to save the file afterward.
Rebuild Your Webtile
The contents of the original WeatherTile.zip were an icons folder, the manifest.json file, and a readme.txt file. Select ONLY the icons folder and manifest.json, and create a new .zip file with a name of your choosing. Once done, rename the extension from “.zip” to “.webtile”.
EDIT: User primortal has a tip for those of you having issues with this step. Windows 10 has the option to right-click a folder, then use Send to > Compressed (Zipped) Folder. Try that and it should work. Thanks!
Install Your Webtile
Email the new .webtile file to yourself at an email address you can access from your phone. Open the email and click on the .webtile attachment. It’ll automatically open in Microsoft Health, and it will ask if you want to install the new web tile. Choose the checkmark at the bottom to accept and let the app do its thing. Once it’s done updating, scroll to the last tile on your Band to see the weather. You can change the position of the tile in the Microsoft Health app itself.
Enjoy!
And don’t forget to leave a comment with any suggestions for how I can make this tile better. Thanks for your time, and I hope you like it!