Weather Channel Dashboard Widget: Your Local Weather Forecast on Your Desktop

Originally downloaded 11/24/06. The Weather Channel has finally weighed in to the Mac market with a Dashboard widget and screensaver you can download. Excited by a review on TUAW, I did just that… and man, was I disappointed! The editors at TUAW usually do a better job screening out the chaff from the wheat, but not this time.

This widget is like a lot of the ones we saw in the early days of Dashboard… widgets whose main purpose isn’t to inform you or provide useful functionality, but rather to lure you to the developer’s or company’s website. That isn’t what widgets are for, and I advise you to avoid the Weather Channel widget if you feel the same way. All you get here is a smidgen of info about the current weather, plus a sparse 3-day forecast and a radar image that’s too small to be useful. Click on anything else (e.g., a 10-day forecast, an hourly forecast, or details for a particular day), and you’re unceremoniously yanked from Dashboard and taken to the Weather Channel site in your default web browser. (Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, the screenshot here shows the widget after I’ve clicked on the “Forecast” tab…)

There are plenty of other decent weather widgets (including Apple’s own) that have more information than this… and just because it’s from the Weather Channel doesn’t mean it’s worth getting the temperature from. Compare this with the amazing widget Fidelity gave Mac users last month, and it becomes clear this widget is a throwaway. And I’m throwing it away, too! Don’t let companies like Weather.com get away with this kind of foolishness, folks.

Version as tested: 1.0.