Joe Button's Website

Zirtek, the manufacturers of anti-allergy medicines, provide a free (as in beer) desktop app that tells you the pollen forecast for your area. It's Windows-only, but with a small amount of cunning we can work out what it's doing and make our own version. Wireshark reveals that the app is downloading data from an XML feed here. Zirtek don't seem to publicise that url but it's on the public internet so I guess there's no legal issues with using it.

I made a gnome applet, which you can install as follows:

$ svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/pollencount/gnome_applet pollencount_gnome_applet
$ cd pollencount_gnome_applet
$ sudo make install

Then right click on your panel, click Add to Panel and select 'PollenCount'. Right-click the applet to set your region.