Quill Weather 2.2 – Release Notes

Quill Weather is a small app with a big job: to watch the sky for you and speak up the moment it matters. It began life inside Quill Radio’s Weather menu, and 2.2.0 is the moment it stands on its own – a program you can install, update, and leave running by itself, quietly on guard.

It shares Quill Radio’s version number on purpose. The two grew from one weather effort and run the very same code, so 2.2.0 means the same weather in both. But they are separate apps now, each with its own installer, its own tray icon, and its own update feed – install one, both, or neither.

Headline: the QuillVille Runtime and lighter downloads

Quill Weather now shares one Python runtime – the QuillVille Runtime – with every other QuillVille app (QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Audio Studio). It is installed once per user and reused by all of them, so once any Quill app has installed it, every app you add afterward starts instantly. The runtime is reference-counted: it is removed only when the last app that needs it is uninstalled.

That shared runtime adds two feather-light ways to get Quill Weather, alongside the fully self-contained editions:

Every runtime download, whether triggered by an installer or by the app’s own first launch, shows a fully accessible progress bar that works with NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator, announcing progress as a percentage. See “Editions and the QuillVille Runtime” below for the full list of downloads.

The app’s launcher is also now a genuine, tiny native program, and the bundled Python is the official unmodified build. Earlier versions used a renamed and modified copy of Python’s pythonw.exe as the launcher, which some antivirus tools flagged as a false positive. That pattern is gone, so the Quill apps are far less likely to be flagged.

The idea: a guardian, not a screen

Most weather apps are something you open, glance at, and close. Quill Weather can be that – a clean, fully spoken Weather Center you arrow through – but its heart is the part that keeps working after you look away.

Turn on Weather Monitoring and it keeps a steady eye on your location’s official National Weather Service watches, warnings, and advisories, and speaks each new one the instant it is issued – interrupting whatever is being read for the serious ones, a tornado or a flash flood, and telling you when the all-clear comes. It watches while the window is tucked in the system tray, resumes on its own the next time you launch, and shows a tray notification for every new alert. When a warning is live it quickens its pulse, checking as often as once a minute; when the sky clears, it eases off.

The documentation is finally reachable from inside the app

A small fix with an embarrassing history: Quill Weather’s installer has always placed this document and the user guide right next to the program, and until now nothing in the app could open either of them. The Help menu offered Check for Updates and About, and that was all.

Help > User Guide and Help > Release Notes now open them in your browser, where you can read them with the heading, link, and find-in-page navigation your screen reader already gives you. They are installed alongside the app, so neither needs an internet connection.

Every place you have saved, watched at once

This is the change most likely to matter to you. The alert watch used to cover your primary location and nothing else – so a warning for your workplace, your daughter’s town, or the house you were driving to that weekend went unheard, even though the place was sitting right there in your list.

Monitoring now covers every location you have saved, with no extra setup and nothing to switch on. Each place is checked on the same schedule, and every new alert is spoken with its place named – “A Tornado Warning is in effect for Tucson, Arizona” – plays the alert sound, and drops its own tray notification, so you always know where as well as what.

When monitoring starts you get one warm summary across all of them rather than a line per place: “3 places: Tucson, Boston, and Reno. All clear right now.” The status line, the Start and Stop announcements, and the main window all say either the one place’s name or “for 3 places”, so the app never leaves you guessing how much it is actually watching.

Fine-grained picking – watch these three, skip that one – is still to come. Today it is all of them.

Everything Quill Weather says now reaches braille

Everything the app tells you – a new warning, the all-clear, “monitoring on for 3 places”, a setting you just changed – is now written to a connected braille display as well as spoken. Until now the standalone apps sent announcements to speech only, so a braille reader with speech turned down received nothing at all.

Two refinements keep the display readable rather than frantic: a burst of different messages settles into one write instead of flashing past faster than fingers can follow (the first message writes through immediately, so nothing feels delayed), and an error is held on the display rather than being wiped by the next routine message. Braille is written through your screen reader, so it works wherever NVDA or JAWS is driving the display; Narrator has no braille call here because it brailles the notification Quill Weather already posts.

Underneath, every spoken message now travels through the same shared announcement plumbing QUILL uses, so a message reaches speech, braille, the status line, and the accessibility test capture together. A failure on one channel – a display unplugged mid-sentence, a screen reader that went away – takes down only that channel; you still hear the message. The related preferences live in QUILL’s Preferences and are shared, so setting them once in QUILL is enough.

Alerts even when nothing is running

This is the reason Quill Weather exists as its own app. You should not have to keep a program open to be warned about the weather.

A warning you cannot miss – your way

Every new alert plays an attention sounder. In Settings you can silence it entirely (the alert is still spoken and shown), swap in your own sound file with a Play button to hear it first, and choose how many times it repeats, from once to ten. And so a real warning never catches a setting wrong, Test Alert rehearses the whole thing on demand – the words, the sound, the tray toast, and the alert window – clearly marked as a test.

The forecast, spoken in full

The Weather Center reads, as plain arrow-navigable, copyable text:

Every value is written for speech – “the wind is blowing from the west-northwest at 5 miles per hour”, not “WNW 5 mph”.

Two clocks, so a far-off forecast makes sense

Check the weather in another city and the report now grounds you in time as well as place. It reads the current local time there, the current local time where you are, and when the reading was taken – “Right now it is Thursday, April 27, 9:51 AM in Tucson, Arizona, and 6:51 AM where you are. This reading was checked just now.” When you and the place you are checking share a time zone, it says so once (“the same time zone”) instead of repeating an identical clock, and an older reading names the exact minute it was fetched in your time rather than a vague “a while ago”. No mental math, no wondering whether an early-morning forecast is stale – the when is spoken as plainly as the what.

Made to fit you

Options > Customize Features… turns whole areas of the app on or off – Alert Monitoring, NOAA Weather Radio – and the ones you switch off simply disappear from the menus, exactly the way QUILL and Quill Radio let you tailor themselves. And the apps stay within reach of one another: Open Quill Radio and Open QUILL sit in the File menu and the tray, each opening in its own window.

An icon of its own

Quill Weather used to ship a byte-identical copy of Quill Radio’s broadcast-wave icon – not a similar drawing, the same file, carried over when the app was scaffolded. So did Quill Inkwell and QUILL Audio Studio. On a desktop with both Quill Weather and Quill Radio installed, the two were indistinguishable in the taskbar, in Alt+Tab, in the Start menu and in the notification area, which for an app that lives in the tray is where it spends its whole life.

Quill Weather’s icon is now a gold sun behind a white cloud, on a sky-blue tile. Every app in the family has its own now: they still read as a set – one rounded tile shape, one gold accent – but each has a distinct picture and a distinct colour, chosen to differ in lightness as well as hue, because a set separated only by hue is one that some colour-blind users cannot tell apart.

Weather’s is the one glyph in the family that is a picture of a thing rather than a diagram, because weather is the one app whose subject is a thing.

Not a fork – a guarantee

Quill Weather runs the exact same weather feature code as QUILL and Quill Radio, from the same upstream quill package. Improvements land once, upstream, and reach all three together. This app is only the wrapper, the installer, the icon, and these docs – so choosing Quill Weather never means choosing an older or lesser version of the weather.

Editions and the QuillVille Runtime

All QuillVille apps now share one Python runtime, the QuillVille Runtime, installed once per user and reused by every app. Install it a single time and every Quill app you add afterward starts instantly. It is reference-counted, so it is removed only when the last app that needs it is uninstalled. Pick the edition that fits how you want to run Quill Weather:

Every runtime download, whether triggered by an installer or by the app’s own first launch, shows a fully accessible progress bar that works with NVDA, JAWS, and Narrator, and announces progress as a percentage.

The app teaches itself

Help > Tutorials… (Ctrl+Alt+F1) opens 11 guided tutorials – 60 steps, about three quarters of an hour of material – covering every feature Quill Weather has.

They are not a second copy of the user guide. A guide answers “what does this do”. It cannot answer “what do I do now”, because a document cannot see what you have already done. This window can.

Three tracks, and the middle one is the app

Your first ten minutes (3 lessons) – add a place, read everything the app knows about it, and learn the one key that answers without opening anything.

Being warned (5 lessons) – this is what Quill Weather is for, so it gets five: start the watch and understand exactly what it promises; rehearse an alert at a moment of your choosing rather than at three in the morning; decide what gets through (severity, hidden events, the sound and how insistent it is); keep the watch running through the tray, the sign-in entry and the background check; and NOAA Weather Radio, out loud, with an honest note about what an internet re-stream is not a substitute for.

Making it yours (3) – several places rather than one, the settings that decide how long a reading takes to speak, and living beside the rest of the family.

What makes it more than a document

A step names a command, not a key, so the key you read is the key you have. Try it runs the step exactly as its key would. And Follow me watches the app once a second and moves you on when it can see you have done the step – your saved places growing, the watch starting, alert checks pausing.

It watches state rather than keystrokes, so starting the watch from the menu, the tray, the key or the palette all count equally. It compares against a baseline taken when the step was shown, so somebody with three places already saved has not passed “add a place”. And anything it cannot read answers “cannot tell”, which the window treats exactly like a step with no check at all.

Nothing is graded and every step still has Next.

Quill Weather has command names now

Every weather verb was a bound menu item and nothing else. That cost this app two things nobody had noticed: the Command Palette – which Quill Weather carries, like every app in the family – could not reach a single weather verb, so the one surface built for “do a thing by name” was the one surface that could not do the thing this app is for. And a tutorial step could not name a verb, because there were no names.

So Weather Now, Quick Weather, Active Alerts, Add Location, Settings, Test Alert, the monitoring toggle and pause, and both NOAA commands now have command ids, registered with the keys their menu labels already advertise. Nothing about the menus changed. They simply have names, which means the palette reaches them and a lesson can point at them without hard-coding a key that somebody might rebind.

The rest of the shape

It is a real window, not a wizard: leave it open, work in the app, and hear the lesson move on behind you. Typing here in the filter narrows the contents to the tutorials about the window you came from. Your place is kept per lesson, and Forget my progress clears the lot and changes nothing else – nothing about your progress leaves this computer.

Read it all shows a whole tutorial as one page, and The whole book as a document opens all 11 as one page, generated from the same lessons the window teaches from (it ships as tutorials beside this document).

The same window and the same key serve Quill Radio, QUILL Cast and QUILL, each with its own lessons and its own progress file.

Known notes