Remember the old days when you used to have to go outside to see what the weather was like? Well, Weather Dock, a desktop app for Mac, eliminates that need by placing a handy little icon in your dock that can show you the current conditions, or a range of other information. 

Of course, nothing beats getting a little bit of fresh air to find out what the weather outside your window is like. But if that’s simply not practical, Weather Dock is a great stand-in. Once you download it from the Mac App Store, it automatically appears in your dock. Allow it to know your location and it will instantly bring up the current weather conditions. Depending on the number of icons in your dock, this can be a bit difficult to see, as more dock apps makes each icon a bit smaller, but still, you should be able to at least be able to see the current temperature at a glance.

Weather Wizard

Things get really interesting when you click on the icon, though. Do so and you’ll be presented with a colorful grid showing you details about the current conditions, the forecast for the day and the weather outlook for the next three days. Included in current conditions, you’ll find the “feels like” temperature, wind speed, wind direction, rain accumulation, dew point, humidity, and sunrise and sunset times. 

This is also where you can access the app’s control panel by heading to Preferences under the Weather Dock name in your toolbar. This will allow you to choose what you’d like the dock icon to display: current conditions, today’s forecast, or tomorrow’s forecast. You can also set the font color and choose how fast you’d like its small animation to run. 

Launching the preferences panel also gives you the chance to upgrade Weather Dock for $2.99. Doing so removes ads, lets you see seven instead of three days of forecasts, gives you the ability to add extra locations, and provides three days worth of hourly forecasts. The fee is minimal and, if you want a quick, simple way to be on top of the weather, there aren’t many better or more affordable ways to get there than with the full-featured version of this app. On the other hand, if you’re not a total weatherbug, then the free version should work just fine. 

As for accuracy, the data used by the app is provided by The Weather Company, the new name for The Weather Channel. It’s a company owned by IBM and is well-known for its accurate forecasting ability, so we found the data provided by the app to be very reliable. 

Download Weather Dock Here