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Montanan · Oct 9, 2003, 01:08 PM

I became a big fan of the menu bar weather program Meteorologist a few months ago, and was pretty disappointed when the developer announced he was suspending work on the app. There's now little doubt the program's useful days are numbered, since changing data formats from the various weather servers will sooner or later not be recognizable by the current Meteo.

But I came across what seems like a worthy freeware successor recently, Weather Desk. (The program's currently in it's second release, a 1.0 beta.) It's pretty full-featured, and seems to be very solid and easy to use ... and since there were a lot of Meteo fans here on MacNN, I thought I'd mention it to you all.

Peter · Oct 9, 2003, 01:12 PM

Mounting failed for me :/

Montanan · Oct 9, 2003, 02:51 PM

The disk image seems to be fixed, now.

Funny thing, though ... while the program works great on my PowerBook, I just tried loading it on the iMac, and it consistently crashes on launch. Sigh ...

gorickey · Oct 9, 2003, 03:21 PM

Originally posted by Montanan:
The disk image seems to be fixed, now.

Funny thing, though ... while the program works great on my PowerBook, I just tried loading it on the iMac, and it consistently crashes on launch. Sigh ...

Damn, I wanted to try this out as well...but it won't launch on my iBook! Darn.

Any screenshots from your working PowerBook of this app??

Montanan · Oct 9, 2003, 03:38 PM

Originally posted by gorickey:
Any screenshots from your working PowerBook of this app??

Sure, here you go ... hopefully I didn't downsample the image too much. The shot has both the running Weather Desk app itself, as well as a selection from the included Menu Extra:

Montanan · Oct 9, 2003, 06:08 PM

Looks like there's an updated version out now that doesn't crash at launch ... worked for me, anyhow. (If you tried the crash-prone version earlier today, you'll need to delete the plist file created by that version in order to get the corrected app to work.)

neilw · Oct 10, 2003, 09:19 AM

It seems to me that any weather program that depends on parsing data from the major internet weather feeds is going to run into trouble periodically trying keep up with all the format changes. WeatherPop was great until a series of outages caused people (including me) to take a look at, and switch to, Meteorologist. Then it eventually suffered the same fate, and I can hardly blame Matt for not wanting to spend his life responding to changes in the weather.com format every 2 hours, for freeware no less.

Does WeatherDesk offer any real promise for dealing with the ever-changing feeds, or is it just going to be more of the same?

Adam Betts · Oct 10, 2003, 12:04 PM

Still have some ways to go but it does look promising.

Thinine · Oct 10, 2003, 01:45 PM

What ever happened to Meteo 2.0?

gorickey · Oct 14, 2003, 09:23 AM

Originally posted by Thinine:
What ever happened to Meteo 2.0?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/heat-meteo/

That's the latest....

malvolio · Oct 14, 2003, 01:17 PM

Originally posted by Montanan:
Looks like there's an updated version out now that doesn't crash at launch ... worked for me, anyhow. (If you tried the crash-prone version earlier today, you'll need to delete the plist file created by that version in order to get the corrected app to work.)

The updated version still won't launch on my G3 iMac. And yes, I did delete the old .plist file first.