Joe’s entry on weather stuff yesterday reminded me of a great little app I keep around for getting a look outside even when I can’t get to a window. Son of Weather Grok is a freebie from Bains Software:
Son of Grok will show the temperature, sky conditions, humidity, wind speed, pressure, ceiling, visibility, and much more. Weather data is usually updated hourly from NOAA, and you can set Son of Grok to get this data at specified time intervals. The data is then displayed in an easy to read format using fancy-schmancy sky condition illustrations like you see on the news, along with the details in a small scrolling ticker and drop down list.
SWG has a customizable list of weather reporting stations that you can call up with a couple of keystrokes, can be set up to refresh its information however often you like, and will display an icon and give a little sound effect related to the weather conditions outside — if it’s raining, you’ll hear rain falling; a sunny day, you’ll hear birds chirping. Some of the sound effects are a little cutsie and annoying, but you can shut it off easily enough. If you’re really into this stuff, SWG will even save the weather data it retrieves to a file, in plain text, tab or comma delimited, or XML formats.
SWG is for Macs running OS 8.6 and above. I thought there was a Winders version too, but couldn’t find anything after poking around a bit this morning. Go figure. I’m sure someone will post a link to something that’ll work on the Dark Side.
