How To Follow The Weather On Your Mac.

Steve Jobs was right. The Mac has become the digital hub that connects to everything, syncs to everything.

If we could only get the Mac to do something about the weather. Wait. The Mac syncs to weather, too.

Forget the TV news at 11. Weather changes and I have half a dozen tools on my Mac to track what happens. It’s better than a CNN meteorologist.

If Alex is a sucker for free software on your Mac, then I’m the Mac360 sucker for gadgets, widgets, and cute tools that actually do something worthwhile.

Take the weather. Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Sorry, your Mac can’t fix the weather, change the weather, or affect the weather.

But your Mac is our center of the universe, the digital hub in a digital world of information, so what does the Mac do about weather?

I wasn’t kidding. I have half a dozen tools on my Mac to track weather. Everyone with a recent Mac has the weather widget on their Dashboard, right? All the basics are just a click away. Temperature. Conditions. Forecast.

What else do you need? Apparently, more than that, because that’s only one and I have five others, including the Weather Channel Widget.

We all know that the weather changes, but did you know that weather is different depending on the source of the data? Wherever you are, that’s the weather and current conditions.

But weather monitoring is done all over the country and different sources report weather differently, so it only stands to reason that your Mac would have different sources for weather information. Think of it as weather ala carte. Choose what you like.

There’s the popular Weather Underground Widget. That’s more weather data than most of us need, but if you’re a data junkie, it gets worse better.

I’ve used, depending on the Mac, my mood, and how quickly updates arrive, WeatherPop Advance and Meteorologist. The former costs a bit, the latter is free. Both fit nicely in your OS X Menu Bar, but only one at a time.

I like widgets and radar. Putting both together is a plus, so Radar in Motion is a handy tool to track radar and conditions in a specific area. Red and orange are bad weather, green is good weather, white is pretty weather, but don’t touch.

A favorite for detailed information, both current and historical, is Home Weather Center.

You truly get what you pay for with weather tools. Home Weather Center is graphs, graphics, and more color, including rainfall information, custom alerts, historical data, and a journal for your own weather notes.

Another comprehensive Mac weather tool is Seasonality. Monitor detailed weather information from multiple locations, including satellite imagery right alongside daily graphs of various conditions.

Seasonality displays weather data in a more logical and colorful fashion than most other weather tools and pulls data from the US National Weather Service, among others, but, unlike Home Weather Center, is US-based only.

There was a time a few years ago when weather information came from the radio, or TV during the news. The Weather Channel on TV became another source, but wasn’t primary. Newspapers? Why bother.

An internet connection and my Mac is almost all I need. Except for that whole “portability” issue which is now partially solved with an iPhone. For now, the Mac is my digital hub and the center of everything weather except for what’s going on outside.

What weather tools do you have on your Mac? How accurate is the data?