7 Ways To View Weather On Your Mac

While there is no Weather app that comes with your Mac, there are several built-in ways to see weather. In addition, you can access weather in a few other places, like on the Web, in email and even using the Calendar.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you seven ways to get weather from your Mac.
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Now one thing that the Mac is lacking that you could find easily on an iPhone is the Weather App. You don't have a default Weather App on the Mac. But there are a few ways that are built into the Mac to show the weather very easily and a few other ways you can get weather as well. So the main built-in way to get weather on your Mac is the Notification Center widget. This is the closest we come to a built-in app. It's not quite an app. It's a Widget! But all you need to do is click on the time and date at the top right corner to bring up the Notification Center and here you'll see your Widgets. One of those widgets, by default, is Weather. So you can see it right here and you could change it to one of three different modes.
Let's Control Click on it and we can change it to Medium. You could see it gives you a few hours into the future. You could also change it to Large and then you get a list of hours and the forecast for the next few days. Control Click on it and Edit at the top there to change the location. Just click on the location there and search for the town that you're in or something close by. Also, of course, if you go in and select Edit Widgets you're in Edit Widget mode. You can do lots of different things here. You can click on this and change location. You can change the size of it. Just like before Control clicking or two-finger click on the trackpad, right click on the mouse and change the size. You can move it around. You could even add multiple ones. So here we can go to Weather on the left there. I could have the small one here at the top. Switch to the Large on and add that to the bottom. So now you get a quick view of the weather at the top and scroll down to see more.
The Notification Center is easy to bring up by clicking here on the time or in System Preferences you can set two other ways to get to it. One is under Trackpad. If you're using a trackpad under More Gestures there's a Notification Center swipe that you can turn on and use that. You can also go into Keyboard, Shortcuts, and under Mission Control there's Show Notification Center and you can set a keyboard shortcut and activate it.
Now in addition to Notification Center you can use Spotlight to bring up weather. So use Command Space to bring up Spotlight and then if you just search for weather you'll come up with a variety of different things including Apps, Files, and all of that. But if you scroll down enough you'll see just a category right here, Weather. You could select that. That will give you the weather forecast. You can go right to it by typing something like weather here and then is shows you this summary there. A tap will enlarge that or you can do weather forecast and it brings you there as well. But you could also type weather and another location, like in Los Angeles. So you can get weather from around the world.
Siri is another built-in way to get weather. So all you need to do is tell Siri you want the weather. Just one word will do it. Weather. It's currently clear and 82 degrees. You can also ask for other things like, weather tomorrow. Here's the weather tomorrow. If I click on the question mark there and I scroll down and look for weather you'll see it give me some suggestions of other things that I could ask. So I can go by location or ask for a specific thing like the sunrise time.
There's on other app that actually brings up weather. That's the Maps App. So if you go to Maps, wherever your map is centered you're going to see the weather here at the bottom left. It will tell you the temperature. A little icon and the air quality index. If you go to Maps Preferences this is where you turn this On or Off. So the Weather Conditions Show Air Quality Index. The cool thing about Maps is as you move the map around it will change to reflect where you're at. So I could go up here to Boulder and I could see the changes. I could go way up north here and see the forecast there. Weather might not be available in every single area around the globe but for most major locations it should show something here.
Now all of these built-in ways to look at the weather have one thing in common. You can click on them to go to a webpage for more information. So, for instance, under the Notification Center if I click here it will open up Weather.com. Likewise in Spotlight I could go down here and you'll see more on Weather.com and click that. In Siri also there's a link to get more info on the web. Even in Maps you could click here and it will go to the web.
So, of course, another way to actually go and view the weather is to go to a webpage. There are tons of sites that tell you the weather. You've got weather.com. You've got Weather Underground. Probably dozens of other national sites. You've got the National Weather Service. You've got all of your local TV stations, newspapers that probably all have a page for weather. So find a source that you like for the weather and create a bookmark for that. You could even Drag a bookmark here to the Desktop, add it there. Or you could drag one into the Dock and add it there for quick and easy access to that site.
So that got me thinking, is there a way to get weather by email? After all it might be nice to wakeup and have an email in your inbox that tells you today's weather. It could be really useful especially in low bandwidth situations just sitting there waiting for you. It turns out there used to be a lot of services that offered this but not so much anymore. A few local news sources may actually have weather alerts by email. I found some weather sites that do that as well. But it just won't give you the regular daily forecast. I did find if you go to the popular automation service, If This Then That, ifttt.com, you can go to a service there that will send you an email. So go to Explore and then search for weather and then look for Weather Underground. Hidden way down here there's actually one for Get a daily 6:00 AM email with the weather report. So if you set that up you can give your location and it will send one to the email address that you used to setup your free account. You don't need the Pro Account for this. You can just do it with the free account. Then here's an example of an email. So this is the one I got this morning testing this out.
Now, for course, there are also going to be lots of third party apps that do this. So if you go and search for weather in the App Store you're going to find a lot of weather apps. They all get various reviews and some are completely free and some are free but have in-app purchases for more premium features. They all seem to basically do about the same thing although some of them like to put the weather in the Menu Bar while others are kind of a complete app that you launch or maybe they show on your Desktop in some other way. As an example I tried this little one here, Weather for Status Bar. It was completely free and I added it and you can see it appears here. I haven't set a location yet. So I will go to Preferences here, look up Denver, and you can see it's kind of confusing here which one you want. But you can get to it. Set the units. Save it and you could see it gives me my weather with a quick click there. It gives me a nice little current weather status. I'm sure some of these other ones give a lot more information in terms of forecasts, maps, and things like that.
Here's a bonus one. I know a lot of people search for this. How to get weather in your Calendar. After all if you start your day off by looking at your calendar to see what you've got going today and what's coming up later this week it might be handy to have the weather there as well. Since you can subscribe to third party calendars you would think that companies would provide weather in those third party calendars that are automatically updated. It seems like there were a lot of services that offered this years ago but it's hard to find one now. I did find one that still seems to work though.
So if you go to this webpage here you can get a subscription to a specific calendar for the weather in your area. So what you want to do here is first set your city, change to the units that you want, hit Generate and then you can Copy the location to the Clipboard or just Open which will actually put the location right here in the subscription field in the Calendar App. Hit Subscribe. It allowed me to give a name here. I'll just call it Denver Weather. I'll ignore alerts so I don't get alerts for new events which are just actually showing me the weather there. Then I will set Update to Every Hour to keep it fairly updated. Click OK. Then here I go. I've got this weather calendar here. You can easily turn it On and Off. It seems to give me today's weather and days for the next two weeks as well. If I actually look at these individual items here you can see in the notes there's a lot of information here. So that's kind of useful especially if you go to the Calendar App often throughout the day it's nice just to have the weather there. I'm not sure how long that service will last as it seems like these calendar weather services come and go pretty quickly. So if you're watching this in the future and it's not working for you maybe search around for another ical subscription calendar that has weather in it. There are also ways to use If This Then That to get weather information in Goggle Calendars. Of course you can add your Goggle Calendar account to the Calendar app as well. That might be another option there.
So hopefully at some point in the future Apple will actually add a regular weather app to the Mac to join other apps like Stocks and Voice Memos that they added to the Mac in recent years. But until then here are some good alternatives. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Mac Software (84 videos)
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