14 DAY TRIAL // WeatherInfo is yet another forecast utility that fetches meteorological data and tricks the weather into telling the truth for five days ahead. It predicts accurately and its most obvious advantage comes from its simplicity and ease of use that make it accessible to all the categories in the audience. There was a time when people predicted weather conditions based on onion skins and animal behavior, but I’m guessing they didn’t get much fun out of it. It’s probably still not fun predicting it, even with all the available technology, but it’s much easier for the rest of us, who rely on these forecasts to plan our lives weeks ahead. It’s even more convenient if you own a computer, because you can have this information delivered directly on your desktop and for free. WeatherInfo is one alternative you can trust when it comes to planning your weekend or picking the right outfit for the next five days.
Best of all, it comes free of charge and it’s brought to you both in the form of an installer and as a portable application. As a side note, the portable version can be carried on an USB drive and will be available for access on any computer, which is kind of cool if you spend most of your time jumping from one computer to another.
The application relies on data provided by Weather Underground and it will automatically detect your whereabouts. In our case, it detected the country, but it went wrong with the city by a couple of hundred kilometers. You can overlook this minor mishap, seeing as you can manually change the location to any place in the whole wide world.
Your first contact with its interface won’t be spectacular, because it prefers to make an appearance through simplicity and ease of use rather than good looks. The main and only window of the program isn’t colorful enough to cheer you up if you’re under the weather, but it does comprise a decent quantity of weather info that won’t deceive you.
The first of its three tabs holds the data for the current meteorological conditions. To the left of the main window there’s a temperature scale that makes it easy for you to visualize the temperature and to the right, you’ve got a section where all sorts of weather indicators are listed. The set of details include current temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, pressure, dew point, heat index, wind chill, solar radiation, UV index, the level of precipitation and visibility.
It gets almost all of them right, except for the solar radiation and UV index, that were left blank for all the locations we’ve tried. In its defense, this is most probably due to the weather service it uses and not the application itself, but, nonetheless, it’s a downside.
The whole prediction algorithm is based on the weather stations that are nearest to your location, since lower in the main window, it displays information regarding the forecast source, as well as the latitude, longitude and elevation of your city. Even though it updates itself at regular time intervals, there’s also a possibility to update the data any time you want with the push of the designated button in the main window.
The five-day extended weather forecast can be visualized in the second tab of the application. For each of the upcoming days, you get to find out the lowest and highest temperature values, accompanied by a short summary of the conditions. Because the main window is not resizable, these written hints don’t fit into their reserved space and at times, a few letters will be left out of the description.
However, if you hover with the mouse over them, the whole text will be displayed. It’s not that much of a mystery anyway, since you can get a hint of the conditions from the illustrative icons designed to depict the weather and sky status.
The last of the application’s tabs, namely the Options section is where you can set the location you want to retrieve the data for. For every city, WeatherInfo allows you to choose the weather station it should listen to when grabbing the forecast. It’s also possible to set up the update interval (only in minutes), to select the unit system (Metric or Imperial) and to tweak the tray icon’s font and color.
The Good
Its ease of use is undeniable, which is good news for beginners. The system resources will remain almost untouched, without the 10 MB of RAM you need to spare.
We confronted it with other weather forecast resources and it turns out, it’s very accurate and you can truly rely on it to keep up to date with the weather prognosis.
The Bad
Its interface is not the prettiest and it could be revised a bit. The algorithms it uses to automatically detect your location are faulty, as far as the city is concerned.
A cool addition would be the ability to grab weather data for more than one location at the same time.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action: The Truth
