When I recently wrote about hacking Apple's Weather Widget, a common question was: "Can you tell me how to change Apple's Weather widget to use Accuweather.com again?"

Now you might think this is just coming from some people who don't like any form of change, but several people said that the new weather widget simply did not work for them, showing no results or incorrect information for their location.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that no, I don't know how to hack Apple's weather widget to use Accuweather.com. I'm not even sure that it can be done.

The good news is that there is no real need to hack the Apple weather widget, because Accuweather.com provides their own widget which works really well, offering an animated weather map and a 15-day forecast (when expanded, 4 days when collapsed).This should come as good news to those who found that the new weather widget simply just did not work as well, but I would encourage you to check it out even if you like the Apple weather widget.

One minor usage note: I found that when I had expanded the widget I could not figure out how to make it collapse again. There are actually four separate views available which you toggle through by clicking on the "Accuweather.com" banner at the top of the widget (try it yourself and you'll see what I mean).

If you find that you get a blank section of the widget, which also happened to me, remember that command+R will always "refresh/reload" whatever widget you have selected.

iPhone users may be happy to know there is also an iPhone compatible page available.

Back in 2005, John Gruber wrote about Hacking Apple's Weather Widget to Show the Time of the Last Update.

I was disappointed to learn that my customized Weather widget no longer worked in Snow Leopard, and for some reason John's instructions no longer worked for the Snow Leopard version of the Weather Widget.

The culprit seemed to be the JavaScript that John had modified to calculate the time. Unfortunately I don't speak JavaScript, but with a little help from Google I was able to find a workaround which will enable this tip to work again.

Wouldn't it be nice to get a weather forecast whenever you look at iCal? That's the premise behind WeatherCal 1.0, a new Mac application from Bare Bones Software.

WeatherCal inserts a five-day weather forecast for your favorite cities right into iCal (above). If you're syncing your iPhone to iCal, that means you have the forecast in your pocket as well:

WeatherCal is a nifty Preference Pane app from Bare Bones (of BBEdit and Yojimbo fame) that adds the ability to get weather forecasts in iCal by creating all-day events for each day with the relevant information (forecast plus high and low temperatures).

You can add different cities, each of which gets its own iCal calendar and you get forecasts up to 4 days in advance. And since iCal events obviously sync to the iPhone, you can take the forecast with you.

WeatherCal is $10 from Bare Bones Software; a demo version is available for download.

[via Macworld]

Many intense hurricanes in the last five years have caused tremendous damage to the the Gulf Coast and eastern US, so interest in keeping a constant eye on tropical storms has definitely increased. Last August, TUAW covered AccuWeather's tropical storm tracker for iPhone. While this information is part of the overall weather coverage available from AccuWeather, there's a recently updated iPhone app that is focused solely at hurricane watchers.

The aptly-titled Hurricane (click opens iTunes) from Kitty Code, LLC is chock-full of hurricane data. Not only do you get up-to-the minute info on tropical storms gone bad, but you can also look at historical information and storm tracks for just about every storm that has been recorded since 1851.

Hurricane first appeared in the App Store in October of 2008, and a recent update has added many more features that will be useful when the 2009 National Weather Service Hurricane Season officially kicks off on June 1st. Click the Read More link to see the details.

Just when you thought you'd seen all the weather apps you needed to see for the iPhone or iPod touch comes another release today with one very nice feature -- animation.

Looking quite a bit like the weather screen on the HTC Diamond Touch, AniWeather [App Store link] animates the clouds, snow, sun and rain graphic making your current conditions a bit more compelling on screen than the static shot that most other weather apps provide. In fact, it seems the worse the weather, the more interesting the animation.

It is hard to describe the effect in a static image, so here is a link to a video showing AniWeather in all its pixel-moving glory. Sunny days aren't too interesting, but as the weather deteriorates the animations improve. I particularly liked the windshield wiper that leaves smudges just like the real ones.

AniWeather allows you to look up all the weather stations in the U.S. and, unlike the built in Apple weather app, can use the GPS on the iPhone to give you the weather at your current location (U.S. locations only, sadly). You can enter in multiple sites, and use your finger to swipe up and down to change them, which takes a moment to get used to as the Apple app uses a side-to-side swipe.

There isn't a lot of info beyond the basic in this app. No radar, no videos and no detail like wind speed or humidity that other apps like The Weather Channel [App Store link] or WeatherBug [App Store link] provide. Also, those apps are free while AniWeather is $.99 U.S.

On the other hand, AniWeather puts pretty pictures on screen and it might make you smile, even if the weather outside doesn't.

It's late October in ski country, and that means skiers and snowboarders are getting their gear ready, trying to get into shape, and starting to watch the skies for signs of snow.

Snow Reports, from Eddit Incorporated, provides the ability to create your own personalized lists of your favorite ski resorts, and then track the snow conditions and weather at those resorts. Snow Reports can access information for over 2,000 ski areas around the world through OnTheSnow.com's online service.

Ski areas are listed by region and state or province, and a tap on a state or province name provides a detailed list of all the resorts in that area. A red or green "Closed / Open" sign provides immediate feedback on whether a resort is ready for visitors, and an attractive interface provides base and new snow depths.

A quick tap on the resort page displays a full condition report for a ski area, or upcoming weather conditions. A video is available demonstrating highlights of Snow Reports, as well as a Flickr pool of screenshots.

Snow Reports (click opens iTunes) is available now for US$1.99.

Just in time for the first really scary hurricane of the season, Weather Underground is providing an iPhone-specific version of their mobile site that includes a tropical storm tracker. The mobile site URL is http://i.wund.com, and the tropical storm page can be accessed directly at http://i.wund.com/tropical.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the tracker shows the location, intensity, and other statistical information about each storm. In this case we're looking at Tropical Storm Gustav, which appears to now be a Category 3 hurricane. The full-screen view seen above requires a flip to landscape mode.

If you're an iPhone user and live in any location where tropical storms can be a hazard to life and property, you might want to add this site to your Home screen.

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.

When we recently mentioned the release of EarthDesk 4.0 from xeric design, many of the commenters suggested we check out the OSXplanet Project. OSXplanet is a Cocoa port of the Open Source program Xplanet and like EarthDesk puts a "live" picture of the earth on your Desktop. However, like Xplanet, OSXplanet can also display other planets in the solar system (though perforce with not quite as much live data). You can choose from a variety of map projections, see cloud formations, mark cities on the map (and even center the view on one of them), track storms, view earthquakes and volcanoes, and even some satellites (as I write this, the International Space Station seems to be about over Chicago). Surprisingly, it doesn't even require too big of a memory hit (I'm at about 54MB real).

OSXplanet is a free download though its author (who is all of 17 years old) requests donations ($20 suggested).

Is Apple's default weather widget not offering enough excitement? Are you looking for a little more cutesy, life-or death-drama with your ambiguous weather reports? Then check out Flappie, the widget that needs you to both feed and play with it (while also allowing it to sleep) from time to time in order for it to continue displaying generic (read: no actual temperature readings) weather reports. But be careful - if you don't care for Flappie on a daily basis, it could most certainly die. On the other hand, the longer you can keep your little Flappie alive, the better a chance it has "to evolve." Into what exactly is the answer Timothy Breslin, the widget's author, is apparently keeping to himself.

When my machine was a rickety little 800 MHz iBook, crusted with too many hacks, apps and utilities, I just gave up on Widgets. Dashboard was a system hog on an already dog-slow machine, and I just killed it off.

My MacBook Pro is another story. While I've eschewed the volume of Widgets a true power-user may install, I have my fair share. Of course, until we're able to safely and securely swap our sets of Widgets around, I just keep a certain set loaded. Yes, I've tried MultiDash, primarily to swap around when I plug in to my 24" external monitor. I would have included a link to the MultiDash page, but going there today either crashed Firefox or made Safari eat up processor. Gotta love that...Anyway, as a Widget, it was too wonky for production use, so here's what I've settled on for daily use:

• Apple's own calendar, weather, iTunes, calculator, and search Widgets (Dictionary, White Pages, Yellow Pages, and Address Book). The unit converter is tucked behind the sticky note
• Google search-- pretty much never use it since Google is built-in to every browser but Flock, although sometimes I use the Blogger one too
  
• Radar-in-Motion-- massive kudos to the poor developer who makes this, as NOAA keeps changing the protocols, formats, etc. I love this thing, but I love weather.
• WeatherBug-- this one has a bunch more features, but ironically doesn't work as well as R-i-M
• iClipLite-- what would I do without this? Very handy for storing form letters, the very ones I use every day
• iStat nano-- surely everyone is using this or its older sibling by now, right? Often I use it to check my IP address, but I really wish I could have it quit bugging me about updates, that is really annoying
• Slothcam-- I have it always tuned to the TGIFriday's camera in Times Square, great for people-watching! (You will see me on there once in a while too)
• Web Translator widget (uses Google)-- handy for quick language lookups, as my Spanish vocab stinks sometimes
• Airport Radar-- handy for checking signal strength
• PackageTracker-- from Monkey Labs, where they make a terrible TV Tracker... only terrible because every week they want me to update it, but it never gets faster or better, yet PackageTracker never bugs me about it
• iCalEvents-- super-fantastic for glancing at my hard schedule for the day
• Backpack widget-- from Chipt.com, this Widget has saved me so many times it is scary. If you are a serious GTD nut, you must have a Backpack widget for simple ticklers, and this does the job better than almost anything. Plus, I can access my Backpack reminders from anywhere via web, so I have a constant backup. Combined with floating reminders via Growl, and you can really tame your to-do list.
  
• an obligatory digg widget-- because I'm addicted, I'll admit (where's that Netscape widget?)
• Veronica Belmont-- she's not a Widget, but a spunky tech pundit for CNet
• and of course, I have a TUAW widget!

So what's in your Dashboard?

Pod2Go, the versatile information manager for your iPod, has updated to v1.6.4 with various improvements and a name change to Life2Go (Did Kevin get a call from Apple about his choice in application names?). A v1.0 is also available for Windows (traitor!), though I don't know if that is a recent development with this name change.

Updates to the application itself including switching to WeatherBug for all weather information, significant changes to the Notes output and Mail storage, more specific syncing progress and more.

A demo of Life2Go is available, while a full license runs for $12.99.

If you are serious about weather Seasonality is an application that you should have on your Mac. This killer weather app from the fine folks at Gaucho Software has recently been updated to version 1.3 which makes it a Universal Binary. Univeral goodness is not the only added feature in 1.3, other additions include a new weather journal and improved radar images.

When I first tried Seasonality I was impressed, and slightly overwhelmed, by the amount of information that this application gives you about the weather. If you're just looking to see if you need an umbrella this is overkill, but if you are truly interested in weather I can't imagine a better way to spend $24.95.

Here's a great weather Dashboard widget that makes Apple's Weather look downright anemic. WeatherBug Local Weather by WeatherBug displays your local weather, live radar shots, current news and even alerts and warnings for your area.

Click the "Animate" button at the bottom of the screen and you're brought to a web page with the radar animation. It would be cool if this worked within the widget, but it's hardly a deal breaker. Check it out.