14 DAY TRIAL // Come rain or shine, Weather Center’s ready to predict it. It makes for a great alternative to the Weather Channel or the classic newspaper weather column in a pleasant and highly customizable forecast center that never lies.
If you’re looking for the most accurate weather prediction ever made, well, here it is: “Weather forecast for tonight: dark” (George Carlin). And it’s a long-term prediction too, if you’re a resident of the South Pole. If not and you want to know what the weather’s going to be like during the day, you’ve got plenty of notifiers over the Internet that are ready to deliver your daily weather prognosis directly on your desktop. One of them is Weather Center, a system tray application that gives you a five-day heads up of just how moody the weather’s likely to be.
It’s for free and that pretty much covers the first reason why it should be granted at least a glance. Besides, handling it is easy all together, starting with the installation process, which turned out to be short and complication free. Two aspects worth mentioning here are that it requires .NET framework and also, a system restart is needed before you can actually start using the application.
It starts with Windows by default and it resides in the system tray, where it places an icon showing the current temperature for your location. On the first run, it won’t actually show the temperature, since it doesn’t feature algorithms to automatically detect your whereabouts and instead, it requires that you manually enter your location in order to retrieve meteorological data. This can easily be set from the menu that pops up when you right click on the tray icon. It’s more like a control panel, really, since it provides access to all of the software’s functions and to the main window, which holds the detailed weather prognosis. In fact, the program’s interface comprises such a great deal of details that you might find it a bit crowded at first, but you’ll grow fond of it once you acknowledge the level of information it offers you.
Weather Center features a day and a night view, which means that it changes skins accordingly. It dresses in white during the day and in black during the night and like it or not, it stays that way, because customization in this matter is not possible. Regardless of the color of the skin, the details and the way they are shown in the main window remain the same. The interface is divided into two large areas, one that shows the detailed current weather conditions and data, located in the upper side and one displaying a forecast for five days ahead (current day included) in the lower side.
As far as the weather data is concerned, this program is keen on offering you a qualitative prognosis that bears quite the set of details, from humidity, wind intensity and speed, dew point, pressure and visibility to astronomical specifics, such as sunrise and sunset time, daylight interval and the current moon phase during night time. You can also get the current UV index, which alerts you with regard to the ultraviolet radiation level.
The five day prognosis that it holds will keep you posted with the highest and lowest temperature values, as well as the precipitation level. In order to better illustrate the weather conditions, it displays suggestive icons in agreement with the forecast. If you don’t fancy the default set of icons, you’ve got three more that you can choose from and that can really style up the looks of the main window.
Further customizations are made available from the right click menu of the system tray icon. It pops up possibilities to switch the weather data format between Metric and Imperial and allows you to change the temperature color and font and to adjust its position in the system tray. You’ll surely notice that by default, the icon doesn’t really fit the system tray and tweaking it in order to make it entirely visible may take a while. All changes performed from the control panel are immediately visible, without the need to restart the application.
Double-clicking on the tray icon will show a window that displays the weather conditions for the current day only and that stays on top of any other application you have open, so you can be kept up to date with the weather cast at all times.
What we’ve found to be a great feature and also rare for software belonging to this category is the speech option. Weather Center can and will speak the time and weather conditions for you location once an hour or every 15 or 30 minutes. You can actually choose the weather details to be spoken or you can mute the speech option for specific hours. Also, the voice rate and volume can be customized and tested on the spot, to give you a hint of what the real thing is going to sound like.
Weather Center has a minimum impact on the system resources, taking up only 25 MB of the system RAM and about 2% of the CPU (tested on Intel Dual CPU T2410). It’s very easy to handle and offers an accurate weather prognosis, based on the services provided by the Weather Channel and the US National Weather Services.
If you own a laptop, it displays the battery charge and features a battery saver mode. The forecast could be extended to more than five days, to make it even more appealing to users who need a long term prognosis. It also would have been nice if it had the means to fetch the weather forecast for two locations at the same time. It would certainly be appreciated by users who are on the road or travel a lot. Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
