Mike-Ward.Net

Vista Weather Gadget

Vista Sidebar Gadgets are handy and useful little applications that reside on your desktop. Weather gadgets are a very popular category and yet I’ve never found one I can live with for any length of time. It seems like most of these gadgets are more about the “gadget” or “branding” than the weather. My weather gadget doesn’t sport any fancy graphics relying instead (gasp!) on words. Here are few examples:

This gadget is 130 pixels square and fits comfortably in the sidebar. In a single view the current conditions, forecast for today and the following three days are displayed. It’s densely packed and a bit terse but you don’t have to click on it to get the forecast.

The format should be self explanatory. The forecast conditions are shortened due to the space restrictions. The ? denotes “Chance of”. For instance, “Snow?” can be read as “Chance of snow”.

This gadget is in an early development stage and yet I find it so much more useful than other weather gadgets that I’ve decided to release it earlier than I might otherwise. It’s all of about 48 hours old so it hasn’t had much time to age. I’m sure there are bugs and weather conditions that overflow the table boundaries. I’ll rely on you the user to help find these and suggest shorter versions.

The data comes from the unpublished Google Weather API. As far as I can tell, only zip codes are supported which means it’s limited to US addresses. If someone knows otherwise, let me know.

I’m also interested to know if it works with Windows 7.

You can find it on the downloads page. Enjoy.