WeatherIcon for iPad Hack

I’ve always wanted the WeatherIcon hack for my iPad but it never works. I looked into it again and found that part of the problem is that the iPad doesn’t have the Weather app from Apple like the iPhone does. After looking around in some forums I found out how to get it working. Here’s the steps I took using an iPhone 4 and a 1st gen iPad.

1. Copy the Weather app from the /Application folder of your iPhone or iPod touch to your computer using SSH. For more info on SSH see this page.
2. You’ll also need to copy com.apple.weather.plist from /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences from your iPhone or iPod touch to your computer.
3. Upload the Weather app to your iPad’s /Application folder and the com.apple.weather.plist to the /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences.
4. Respring or reboot the iPad and you should see a Weather icon now. It opens for me but looks a little weird. See extra steps below for how I fixed this.
5. In the Weather app, check to see that the first city is correct for your area. If not, add it now.
6. Now install WeatherIcon from Cydia.
7. Once installed, go to your Settings app and find the WeatherIcon settings and make sure it’s enabled. I turned off the icon settings because the icon is not the same size as iPad icons so it looked weird. I may go in later and make a bigger icon to make it work. I turned on the image and temp in the status bar. This was the main thing I wanted this hack for.

Your iPad should now have the current temperature and a little image representing current conditions in the top right corner. Let me know if you have any questions or other tips regarding this hack and I’ll add them to the post.

Ok, this gets even trickier but now I’ll show you how I got the weather app to look right once opened. When you first copy it over, the weather forcast shows up in the top left and the background image shows up at the bottom. At first I just deleted the background image and just didn’t worry about it. Then I remembered I had just installed an app called RetinaiPad. It takes the images from apps that support the iPhone 4 retina display and makes the app nice and pretty when it’s full screen on the iPad. At first the Weather app wouldn’t show up under the RetinaiPad settings but I figured out it was because the Weather app was coded to be a dual device app. I found a way to change some code to make it an iPhone only app. This is ironic since the app was never made to originally work on the iPad. So, just use iFile or SSH to open the info.plist file in the Weather app folder of your iPad. Find the following:

<key>UIDeviceFamily</key>
<array>
<integer>1</integer>
<integer>2</integer>
</array>

Then just take out the line with the 2 in it. This is the part of the code saying the app is made for the iPad. So, make it look like this:

<key>UIDeviceFamily</key>
<array>
<integer>1</integer>
</array>

Now the iPad will show the app small like an iPhone only app. This will allow the app to show up in the RetinaiPad setting and you can set it to be full screen using the high res retina images. See what it looks like below. Now I just need to fix the icon and it will completely work.

ScreenShots