Weather Dock free Mac app puts weather forecasts in the Dock

The Dock on the Apple Mac is normally full of unexciting static icons, but they don’t have to be dull. You could have a live animated weather forecast. Here’s a free app that does just that.

If you live in a part of the world where it is always sunny, you probably aren’t interested in the weather forecast, but for some people it is a hot topic. In parts of the world you never know what the weather will be like tomorrow, or even later in the day and there can be rain, sun, wind or even snow.

It is interesting and useful to know what sort of weather is on the way so that you can plan your outdoor activities. Will it be barbeque weather tomorrow or will you be blown away by gales and soaked by rain?

Weather Dock comes in two versions, Free and US $2.99 / UK £2.49. I tried the free version.

There isn’t much to the app and you can enter your location or any location you want to see the weather forecast for (multiple locations in the paid version). The units can be Fahrenheit and mph or Celcius and km/h. The text colour can be black or white.

The Dock icon is animated and it shows a symbol indicating the weather, such as sun, clouds, rain and so on. The animation speed can be off, slow, normal or fast. It can show a badge with the temperature or wind speed.

It works best if you set the Dock icons to be fairly large or set the magnification to large (System Preferences, Dock). The big icon is animated and clear.

You can get a full forecast for today, tomorrow and the day after (7 days is promised in the paid app). This is animated too and it looks great.

It didn’t seem to use much CPU and it hovered around 0.4 in Activity monitor, so it doesn’t impact performance or battery life. It just looks great and it provides a handy forecast whenever you need it.

Title: Weather Dock (Mac App Store)
Developer: Voros Innovation
Price: Free or US $2.99 / UK £2.49
Size: 48 MB
OS X: 10.7 or later
Verdict: A great app for weather watchers.