Because our apartment is kept at consistently crispy crematorium levels of heat and humidity in the winter, it’s surprisingly difficult to determine how cold it really is outside. Most mornings before work, I launch my browser and go to the weather.com site I’ve bookmarked to view the current forecast. But lately, I’ve found myself wanting to shave the valuable 10 seconds that takes down to maybe 5 seconds or so. So I turned to the web to find a program that would constantly display the current temperature on my computer’s desktop. There’s an abundance of such programs out there, but almost none of them met all of my criteria:
- is free
- is small, simple, stable and compact code
- runs in the background (no icon hogging my Dock, please)
- has an elegant user interface
- shows the current weather in the toolbar
That’s all. But with the many programs I downloaded and tried, it was always something. Either I had to pay for the program or it was unbearably clunky or it had 10 other features that had nothing to do with the weather or—and this was most likely—it didn’t show the weather in the toolbar but in an annoying window hogging my preciously small 12-inch Powerbook screen.
During some intense Googling during lunch at my desk today, I came across Meteorologist. It does exactly what I want and meets all my criteria. If you run Mac OS X, I heartily recommend it. I have mine set as a Startup Item. It loads without comment upon booting my computer, then continually and automatically fetches updates on the weather from Central Park every 15 minutes, displaying it in my toolbar, along with an optional little graphical representation.
(For all y’all non-Mac people, the other thingies depicted below in my toolbar are for other nerdy purposes, like telling me how strong my wireless internet signal is, how soon my battery is going to die, and how many more days before CSI: Miami is on again.)
The program’s real power is unleashed when you click on the weather itself, depicted below in a shrunken-down screenshot.
Boing! Here, you can check details on the current conditions (wind speed, humidity, etc.) and get a forecast for the next several days. You can also add other cities’ weather to appear in these fold-out menus, like, say, Cleveland or Laramie, Wyoming or Dublin. Gravy!
Update, March 7: Now that I’ve tested Meteorologist for a few days, I may need to knock down my appreciation a notch; when my PowerBook wakes from sleep (I rarely turn it off), the current temperature doesn’t automatically refresh, which I think it should do, like the current time does. Hopefully, this change will be made in an new version.