Filed under: Freeware, Open Source, Universal Binary
Meteorologist unofficially updated to 1.4.5, Universal binary
Many times after posting a screenshot on TUAW I've had people ask about the weather program I run in my menubar. Despite having tried nearly all of the menubar weather programs (of which there are many as we mentioned a while back) I always come back to the open source Meteorologist. As much as I like it, however, it has been difficult to recommend to people because development had almost stopped and no official Universal build was available (though some unofficial Intel builds had been cobbled together, which is what I had been running). A new official version has not been released, but nonetheless there is good news for fans of Meteorologist. In a thread at Sourceforge a new volunteer, Marcus Brenneman, has arisen to help bring the project forward (and the project owner, Joe Crobak, seems willing to accept this help).The first fruits of this is an unofficial build 1.4.5 that solves many of the problems that had arisen as Weather.com changed its weather data server. Furthermore, it is finally a Universal Binary. There are still a few bugs (you can only search for cities by name, not zip code), but the important thing is that it's basically working and Marcus and Joe seem committed to getting the project going again. In the meantime you can now download the unofficial 1.4.5 from Brenneman's personal site here (download link) and once again run the best (free) menubar weather program for the Mac.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
J.J. said 12:30PM on 5-10-2007
I agree, nothing better than Meteorologist.
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MfS said 1:47PM on 5-10-2007
I tried Meteorologist for awhile, but stumbled across WeatherDock, another freebie.
Like WeatherDock much better. The extended forecast on one click is nice, whereas w/ Meteorologist you have to mouse down/over extended forecast dates to see the deets. Personally, I found WeatherDock to be more user-friendly and customizable as well. http://www.alwintroost.nl/content/weatherdock/home.xml
Just my opinion.
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Kevin Vahlbusch said 1:50PM on 5-10-2007
I have trouble with Meteorologist refreshing, anyone else have that issue?
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Sarah said 3:05PM on 5-10-2007
Brilliant, thanks for the link. I'm continually frustrated with the inaccuracies of the weather widget, and this is more detailed anyway!
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Neil said 4:10PM on 5-10-2007
I've been making Intel builds of Meteorologist available for download for a few months -- you can get it from here:
http://www.beatnikpad.com/meteo
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Matthias Schonder said 4:31PM on 5-10-2007
It seems that it doesn't work with my hometown....
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Mark Amsterdam said 6:30PM on 5-10-2007
I have been having serious updating problems for several days now, tried installing the newest version, which doesn't seem to solve the problem, there is no information at all. How do I know now if it's raining outside? ;-)
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Mat Lu said 6:38PM on 5-10-2007
@7: Did you actually trash the older version? I had the problem too (caused by a change in the weather.com server), but once I actually deleted the older version and installed this new unofficial 1.4.5 everything was golden again
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Jay said 7:57PM on 5-10-2007
Got problems, check out:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24171/fix-meteorologist
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Mat Lu said 7:59PM on 5-10-2007
You only need to use the update Jay mentions if you want to remain with 1.4.4; the version I link to above (1.4.5) already includes the update, which is a new xml file in the Meteorologist application package.
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artifex said 8:36PM on 5-10-2007
Neil, are you making builds for everything, now? :)
I know you also do sexy optimized FF builds. (thanks)
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(01) said 11:13PM on 5-10-2007
Neil, can you get any frickin' cooler? I'm saying no at this point, but will probably be proven wrong soon :-)
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Hervé S. said 2:09AM on 5-11-2007
I may be silly, but my current, standard version of Meteorologist is announced Intel in the Activity Monitor.
Is there something I didn't catch?
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Mark Amsterdam said 3:20AM on 5-12-2007
Great, it works like a charm after using the patch! (and it's raining outside btw)
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Jørn Aune said 5:33AM on 5-12-2007
Both Meteorologist and Weatherdock seems to use data only from weather.com. Weather.com does not support many Norwegian cities, but wunderground.com does. Weatherpop also gets data from wunderground.com and that makes Weatherpop the best app for me. But it is not free.
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Ross said 5:44PM on 5-22-2007
Jørn check out the 2.0 alpha on the meteo site as with Joe's new plugin based architecture it does indeed support wunderground.com and is now undergoing development again - I am getting weather data for the UK.
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