We promise not to use this to tease our friends in Wisconsin about how awful the weather is there.
Bare Bones makes some pretty impressive software we wouldn’t really call “simple”--things like professional-caliber HMTL/text editor BBEdit and ultraflexible information organizer Yojimbo. WeatherCal is not one of those. This truly, truly bare-bones utility does one thing and does it well--it adds weather forecast info from your cities of choice to iCal.
The app installs as a pane in System Preferences. From there you search for cities (by name or zip code), airports, national parks, and so on. For every location you add to your list, WeatherCal creates a new calendar in iCal that gives you the basic weather forecast for that locale. The forecasts start on the current day and stretch five days into the future--forecasts for days that already happened drop off the calendar automatically, of course.
If you double-click one of the entries in iCal, the pop-up dialog includes a URL you can click to go directly to the Weather Underground (wunderground.com) for a detailed forecast for that day and location. And of course, if you sync your iCal calendars to your iPhone or iPod touch, or with MobileMe, the WeatherCal calendars go right along.
In our tests, everything worked smoothly--setup is a no-brainer, syncing to MobileMe and to our iPhone performed properly, and we dug the little sunny/cloudy/rainy/snowy icons at the beginning of each forecast. iCal didn’t even have to be running for our MobileMe and iPhone calendars to stay in sync with the latest WeatherCal data.
If you already get weather info from a Dashboard widget, the Weather app on your iPhone, or by manually visiting your weather website of choice, WeatherCal can save you a few minutes by serving that info to your trusty calendar. It’s great for frequent travelers too.
Simple setup. No need to keep iCal running. Links to more detailed forecasts at Weather Underground’s website. Universal binary.
Puts each city on a separate calendar, and iCal only offers six calendar colors, so you might run out of unique colors to code your calendars.
gcoghill
June 30, 2009 at 10:59am
http://www.smashin.com/weather/
And Weather Underground has an "iCal" button when you do a city/ZIP search, look in the top-right just above the 5-day forecast.
