HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
I was so impressed that I clicked that PayPal link and sent 15 Euros.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T h e   R o a d   L e s s   T r a v e l e d
WeatherDock puts conditions into the OS X menubar, and can read forecasts to you


April 13, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   I got tired of waiting for the weather report on that dreary all-news channel the other day and decided to do something about it. No, I didn't call the TV station to complain; I installed a amazing weather reporter on my OS X Macintosh.
   The weather program is WeatherDock, by Alwin Troost of Holland. It's unobtrusive, informative, cleverly designed and free. You're invited to pay anything you want for it if you like it, but you're never dunned by annoying "pay up or else" notices. I like that approach, and I'm sure you will, too. Get it from http://weatherdock.alwintroost.nl.
   In fact, you might like the software enough to donate a small fee -- $15 to $20 would be nice -- via PayPal. There's a handy link in the "About" window in the software itself. (On a Mac, the "About" dialog, or window, opens from the application's menu, just to the right of the Apple menu on the left of the screen. It's always the first item in that menu.)
   WeatherDock makes all the other weather programs I've tried seem amateurish. Telling you about all its features would take two weeks, so I'll just mention the highlights:
   Weather conditions can be read to you. You can choose any of the Mac's built-in voices (something that will surely amaze your Windows-using friends) and you can even customize the spoken report. Mine even calls out my name, then pauses to make sure it has my attention before reading the weather report.
   You can hear the weather report every few minutes, at an interval you choose (from every 15 minutes to once every two hours), and you can decide you want just the current conditions or a much more detailed report.
   You can choose a half-dozen or more locations you want WeatherDock to keep track of. You can make two of them the main locations -- one during work hours and one when you are at home, switched automatically. Or, as I do, you can stick with one main location.
   Weather for the main location is listed in the OS X menu area, at the left of the clock. You can customize that part of the display, too. As I'm writing this column, WeatherDock's menubar display shows a "cloudy" icon with this text: "41 degrees, Cloudy, 9 mph, NNW, 93%, 6.0 mi" -- a shorthand way of saying, "The temperature is 41 degrees and the sky is cloudy, with winds north-northwest at 9 mph. The humidity is 93 percent and the visibility is 6 miles." (The spoken weather is not in shorthand form, and a later version of the software has fewer abbreviations in the menubar list.)
   You can have 11 separate weather conditions listed in the menubar. For example, I could add the dew point, the ultraviolet (UV) index and barometric pressure to my list. WeatherDock even translates weather reports from any major European language into English.
   WeatherDock has behaved well on my dual-processor G4, and I leave it running no matter what else I am doing. Even during intensive video editing, WeatherDock's toll on the processing power of my Mac seems undetectable.
   I was so impressed that I clicked that PayPal link and sent 15 Euros. You might feel like doing the same thing. Encouraging good software is a pleasure.