So where are the beautiful Mac OS weather station apps?

I got started with weather stations with a cheapo Huger WM-918, even though my interest in meteorology has been growing since a young age. It was fun to predict thunderstorm based on natural factors such as the behavior of ants and flies, or the flight patterns of certain birds – all of this, once you had been accustomed to the factors of a certain place, was remarkably accurate.

Back when I installed the Huger, I was mostly a Windows/Linux user, and the best application to connect the weather station to my PC and the internet was Virtual Weather Station by Ambient Weather. It was, although visually appealing, a resources hog, using an instruments library that caused the host PC to grind to a halt. If you were serious about running the software full-time, you needed a dedicated machine to handle the load. Maybe the resources issue has been solved by now, but the screenshots look exactly the same as back then.

Fast forward to today, and I’m the proud owner of a Davis Vantage Pro2 with an extra solar radiation sensor, which I installed on the roof last week. It’s an excellent weather station, with many options and accessories, which allows you to get -very- professional about weather without going into high-end stations that cost thousands.

I became a Mac ‘switcher’ in 2006 with a new MacBook Pro – since Apple made the change to Intel processors, I could run those Windows apps that were not available for OS X (such as electronic circuit design software) in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, while enjoying the stability, performance and yes – beauty – of Leopard.

Naturally, I started looking for Mac software that would allow me to monitor the Davis station and upload real-time data to the internet, and the results of the search were frankly disappointing. There simply are no beautiful Mac OS weather applications, at least, none that I could find.

Before reviewing the contenders, let me clarify the beautiful part. I believe in functional software, but I am also very maniacal about user interfaces and their visual appearance and function. A beautiful GUI shows that the developer put a lot of extra effort during development to make the user experience pleasing as well as functional. I myself have designed what I consider these days awful interfaces, but when I did, I tried my best to make them look good, particularly when compared to alternative options (and I was proud of the results, being completely self-taught on the subject).

My first major release was StumbVerter, with over 750.000 downloads since it was released in 2002. I paid particular attention to the toolbar, the layout of the app, and the icons representing WiFi signals. Then came TrunkSniffer, which was a commercial application (now freeware) used by amateurs as well as trunked network operators and intelligence agencies from various countries. In this case, I remember spending a lot of time making the knobs, dials and graphs look good – while the dialog windows look like complete crap to me when I look at them now.

At Whisher, we hired a specialized firm, Ergosign, to design the GUI and test the usability of the software – and I have to say that it’s one of the engineering areas where we achieved the best results, and I am most proud of. We could criticize many things on the client and service, but the GUI was always well designed, appealing, usable – and beautiful.

Let’s look at the weather software contenders, shall we? I will concentrate on visuals and usability, as they relate with Mac OS, rather than functionality – some apps even post weather data to Twitter, for example.

Davis WeatherLink [link]

It makes sense to start with the manufacturer of my new weather station. When you purchase one of the data logger options, you get a free copy of the WeatherLink application, which reads data from the logger and shows real-time conditions, history, and uploads data to the internet. Here is the app’s main screen:

Now, do I really need to explain what is wrong with this GUI? Standard fonts, child-drawn dials and bar graphs, and Windows 3.11 style icons, make for a very ugly thing to have to look at. On top of this, the Mac OS version is actually written in Java, which makes it sluggish. WeatherLink will freeze every now and then, requiring a restart. Basically, they transplanted the Windows app into Mac OS without paying the slightest attention to OS X GUI guidelines.

Weather Display [link]

Way more featured, but way more ugly than WeatherLink, comes Weather Display, which is a Windows application that has been transplated to Mac OS in some obscure way. The pain starts after installing the app:

That’s right – you get a folder in /Applications, not an application bundle with its corresponding icon. This is sometimes used by other apps, such as Microsoft Office or iWork, but they use descriptive text as the folder name, and show the app launch icons, not a confusing bundle of stuff. Once you open the folder, it gets worse (the screenshot shows only a handful of icons, there’s a ton – click for a full-size version):

In order to start the app, you need to click on the icon named WeatherD – strangely, not named like the parent folder, logic dictates it should be called WDisplay, for example.

Here is the Mac OS version in all its glory shame:

used to send emails to the Whisher developers with screenshots and big red WTF arrows pointing at the slight defects that sometimes happened in the GUI design – in this case, the screenshot would be overwhelmed by red arrows, so I will point at a few of the most blatant issues:

The interface on Windows looks somewhat better, but it is still a mess. They are asking for $70 for this software, and it seems like it is quite popular – it is actually loaded with very useful features. I may be too purist on this, but if I’m going to pay for an application, I want it to look good – unless it’s something where functionality is 100% more important versus looks (e.g. command-line wireless tools such as airodump-ng).

Below are some honorable mentions, honorable in the sense that while they are not as ugly as the two apps above, they are still not really that good-looking, but at least the developers made an effort at developing for Mac OS.

LightSoft Weather Center [link]

This is actually one of the best apps in terms of visuals and OS X guidelines compliance, but the gauges look very simplistic, and the multiple window arrangement makes usage a little awkward.

WeatherHawk

Sadly, it only works with WeatherHawk stations, but it’s by far the most visually appealing application, with a very nice wind gauge, simple to read graphs, and well-spaced (although a bit too wide) data fields. This app is made by AfterTen, who has WeatherTracker in the works, and by the looks of their other apps, it should be the best of the bunch.

There is one final application called wview, which is in reality a set of daemons that retrieve data from various weather station models, store it in an SQL database, and automatically generate HTML files with related graphics which are then uploaded to a web server. The default templates are ugly, but it’s up to the designer to make them as gorgeous as possible, so it’s at least possible to make it beautiful.

I’m actually brewing an idea after this post, but I have to put things into order before I post again giving more details.