When I browse through add-ons of…almost any kind, really… menu bar, dock, Firefox plugins, Wordpress plugins… one kind that shows up very frequently is weather reporting plugins. Everyone seems to really want to know what the weather’s going to be like. Now when you live in New England, I get it, because the weather could veer off into the twilight zone with pretty much no warning, but when you live in the San Francisco bay area, you’ve got a pretty good confidence level that tomorrow’s weather is going to be like today’s, which was like yesterday’s - except for that catastrophic, freeway-slicking “rain shower” that may happen thrice a year… I suppose even people in the San Francisco area want to know what the weather will be like.

My favorite weather widget is WeatherPop. It lives in the menu bar under MacOS X and unobtrusively lets me know what’s going on right outside my window, and what to expect.

WeatherPop is available in two flavors, from weatherpop.com. The first is “WeatherPop Advance”, which supports international cities as well as US cities, allows you to chose the source of your forecast, supports 7 locations, and has a 14 day free trial after which it costs $8 for a license (well worth it, in my opinion). The free version is just regular “WeatherPop”; it also supports multiple locations, but doesn’t do international forecasts and only works with the National Weather Service.

Version 2.3 supports Intel Macintoshes as well as PowerPC Mac’s, although even if you use Rosetta to emulate a PowerPC Mac on an Intel machine, it still runs fine.

It’s pretty, it’s functional, and it’s a one of my favorite pieces of Macintosh software.

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