Your Mac comes prepared with its own widget for you to check the weather, and it works just fine, but sometimes you want something more accurate, with more features, or perhaps that works through your menu bar or your desktop instead of in your widgets.
Today we are presenting you some of the most popular weather apps available for your Mac. These will range from simple menu bar apps to real pieces of art with animations and other visual flair. Take a look!
Weather+
Weather+ is a beautiful app that can give you the weather along with an animation of the current forecast, and you can throw it into full screen to get the forecast for the next 5 days along with a big clock. You also get a few details like wind direction and speed, along with humidity and all those things that nobody really understands.
Weather+ is one of the most popular weather apps on the Mac App Store, for its gorgeous design and its informative weather animations, but I find it to be too distracting to check often. I prefer very much a simpler menu bar app than an app I have to open to check constantly.
Price: $2.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: International Travel Weather Calculator
WeatherEye
WeatherEye is a free alternative to apps like Weather+, and it uses the information of The Weather Network. Along with the app, you get a small menu bar icon that displays the current temperature on a small box. In the main menu you get a not-so-pretty and ad-filled interface where you can see a few days’ worth of forecasts and the other stats like humidity and wind.
Not the best option out there, but if what you are looking for is a conventional, free weather app and you don’t care about simlicity or design, this is a decent alternative.
Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: The Weather Network
Weather HD
Weather HD is similar to Weather+ in that it relies on animations and cool graphics to get your attention. I do, however, like this one more than Weather+ because the animations are just amazing. It allows you to have multiple cities in your configuration and it comes with a useful menu bar icon.
Of course, a beautiful design work comes with a price. If you are willing to pay $4 for a weather app, you won’t regret buying this one. It goes along with the Mac theme very well and it is a pleasure to use. Despite the price, this might be the most pretty option out there.
Price: $3.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Vimov
MachWeather
MachWeather is a free and very simple menu bar weather app that lets you check on the local temperature without having to go into any confusing menus. It just always sits there on your menu bar displaying the current conditions, such as the temperature and the cloud conditions, along with a small icon of the current weather.
While it is a free app and it works very well, I find it to be a bit unsightly. I don’t know why, the icons somehow seem to be off and too much info is displayed on the menu bar. I like simplicity, which is what the next app has.
Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
Developer: Mach Software Design
Menu Weather
MenuWeather is very similar to MachWeather in that it only runs in the menu bar. I use the Lite version of MenuWeather and I have no need for any other weather app, ever. It has beautiful themes that let you use different types of icons, and it displays all the necessary information on a very simple way.
I’ve heard bad things about the paid version, but I’m not sure why anyone would need anything more than the Lite version offers. It’s a very simple and decent looking app, and it’s free!
Price: Free / $2.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Evan Coleman
Weather Dock
Weather Dock is another app that features full-screen animations to let you know the weather, but it does so in a cartoon-ish way that makes it feel pleasant to use. It has basic colors and just a few things on the screen while displaying the weather, so it’s not confusing at all. It will also display the time, date and it even has an alarm feature. Even the icon on the dock displays useful info on the weather.
It might not be as pretty or artsy as WeatherHD or Weather+, but this is a cheaper and less pretentious alternative to those. It has all the features that they do and more, so it’s a very competitive choice.
Price: $0.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Presselite
Live Dock Weather
Live Dock Weather also displays the temperature with a useful icon on the dock, and uses that as its gimmick. When you click the icon, a window is displayed showing the current conditions with all the details, a sidebar with the hour-by-hour forecast and on the bottom the forecast for the next seven days. There’s also a menu bar icon that displays a small window with the current weather and allows you to change a few settings.
It works differently than Weather Dock in that Weather Dock works full screen, but this one just displays a small window. This is also less simple, it has more features and displays way too many things in one window. It’s a good app, just not my favorite.
Price: $1.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Raj Kumar Shaw
Conclusion
The weather app market is a big one. Just go into the Mac App Store and search for the weather category and you’ll be shown about 50 of them. Today we showed the most popular options and tried to break them down into the best menu-bar options and the best full-screen animation options.
If you like the animation ones (I don’t), I would suggest that you spend the $4 dollars for Weather HD. It’s beautiful and it works well. If you are looking for a free alternative that just tells you the weather straight up, I would suggest you try the free Menu Weather and MachWeather.
Which weather app do you use? What are your favorite features from it?