14 DAY TRIAL // Staying in touch with the weather forecast is very important if you plan on going on a vacation or even spend a day outdoors. Although you can find weather information on many websites, there are some tools which deliver the forecast straight to your desktop, and one of them is Meteorologist.
Meteorologist is a free tool that brings the latest weather information straight to your menubar. This contains the current temperature, humidity, wind speed and other data.
The application also contains an extended forecast for the next 3 days, so a user can clearly spot the temperature differences and prepare accordingly.
The tool also provides a user with the means to insert as many cities as needed, and switch between them at any time, without having to restart.
The Looks
At first, Meteorologist can be accessed only from the menubar. This can prove to be a great feature, because the lack of a main window will help the user focus on its current, day to day work. The menubar menus are simple and precise, all of them can be turned on and off from the preferences menu, allowing the user to customize the application in any desired way. This menu also gives users the opportunity to display an application icon in their dock.
The standard menus available from the menubar are: the current city, the current conditions (where you can track the current temperature and important weather characteristics), and the extended forecast, which provides a preview for the next days.
The Works
Working with the application is easy and intuitive, all you need to do is choose a city, and you're good to go. In order to do this, you must go to the Preferences menu and select the Cities submenu. Here you can add as many cities as you want, reorder them by using drag and drop, and also choose the unit measurement for degrees, speed, distance and inches.
The default city is Cupertino, CA, but you can delete it at any time and add your own. Meteorologist grabs its data only from the Weather.com website. While this is one of the most important weather related websites, it would be nice if you could add more servers.
The current conditions menu gives users quick access to current weather conditions. Here, one can see the current temperature and dew point, humidity, the current visibility, pressure, wind and the UV index.
This menu also displays the last update time, as well as a radar image. Unfortunately, the radar image displayed only the United Kingdom and Western Europe, even if the selected cities where in a different European area. For those situated outside Europe, the radar image was displayed correctly.
The reported weather conditions seemed pretty accurate, and I’ve noticed they weren’t very different from the ones reported by other websites.
Meteorologist also provides an extended forecast, that gives you access to a weather preview for the next 3 days. While this is great, having a forecast of the entire upcoming week would provide a user with a lot more information about weather trends. For the upcoming days, Meteorologist will only display weather information, the highest/lowest expected temperature values, and precipitation chances.
As stated earlier, you can monitor weather information for more than one city, even if the menubar displays info for only one at a time. Adding and managing cities is a very simple task, since the application provides drag and drop support, so you can reorder them at any time.
However, I had some issues with the city editor. It seems that even if you order your cities in a certain way, you cannot save the changes, since the application remembers the old order. So, if you want to change the current city displayed on your menubar, the only solution is to select the Controls menu, access the City Switcher and check or uncheck the ones you want.
If you’ve entered a lot of cities in the City Editor, unchecking one of them might randomly change the one displayed in the menubar. The biggest challenge here will be to get back the city you wanted, which can be done by unchecking the cities situated before it in the City Switcher. Above this menu you can access a manual Refresh button, that will grab the latest weather information available for your area. For 6 cities, it took more than 10 seconds for a full update, so expect to wait a lot more if you have selected a large number of cities.
Aside from adding and managing cities, the Preferences menu also provides the means to further customize the information displayed in the menubar. The weather panel allows you to hide temperature types, hide the menubar, weather icons, and even activate submenus.
The Updating panel lets you change the weather update interval for your active locations, as well as choosing a display location for the application: the menubar, dock, or both. The dock icon only shows the current temperature, so you can't know the city unless you look at the menubar.
The tool can also send alerts that inform you about weather changes in your area. These alerts can be sent in various forms, like email, beep, dock icon bounces, on-screen messages or even a SMS, provided you insert a valid phone number. Meteorologist can also be set to play a certain song as an alert.
The Good
The application is also customizable, allowing users to make changes to almost all (sub)menus, remove weather icons, or even change the dock icon opacity. This enables each user to create its own Meteorologist experience, based on his needs.
The Bad
The Truth
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
