Weather Desk 1.0b2 review
DownloadWeather on your desktop and menubar.
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Weather on your desktop and menubar. Please keep in mind that this software is still under extensive development.
Many of the planned, incomplete, and even some of the completed features that will be available in the full version have not been included here. Although we look forward to introducing these exciting features to users in the near future, that is not the intent of this release.
Our hope is that all users of this software will aid its development by notifying us of any bugs, inconsistencies, and conflicts that arise while using Weather Desk.
This will allow us to refine the core of the software, allowing future versions to be free of major bugs.
Weather Desk also allows you to load images of Earth and the moon.
Here are some key features of "Weather Desk":
First Launch Open the Weather Desk application before using the menu extra for the first time. Currently, nearly all error-checking and initial set-up is done from within the main application. This will change in the future, but for now...
Menu Extra Before launching the menu extra, we recommend disabling "Show time connected," and "Show status while connecting" in the remote access menu. The remote access menu, if it is enabled, appears as a "telephone" icon in your status bar. The status bar does not handle multiple animations very well, and may "flash" if you leave these options on.
Locations To add, edit, or remove locations, open the Stations window by selecting "Edit" from the "Stations" menu.
Groups Weather Desk allows you to assign each location to a group. For example, if several cities in our list were nearby, we could place them together in a group called "Local." To edit your groups, simply select "Edit" from the "Groups" menu in the Stations window.
Icons Setting different icons for different locations allows you to quickly find stations when switching to another location. It also looks nice. To add or change an icon, simply drag & drop any file or folder onto the image well in the Add/Edit window. Note: If you drop an image file onto the well, the image will be used and not the file icon.
APOD The astronomy picture of the day will load automatically when you select "A.P.O.D." from the toolbar. Clicking on the Preview button will load a high-resolution version of the image in Preview.app (or your default image-handling application). Note: This is a cached image. If you would like to save this image, simply select "Save as..." or "Export" from the "File" menu in Preview.
Earth/Moon Viewer This feature allows you to load images of Earth and the moon. You can view the Earth as it appears from any of the locations in your list, from a set of coordinates (lat/long), from the night side, from the day side, or from the moon.
As with the APOD, saving an image requires that you export/save in Preview. The larger images sizes will not be entirely visible in Weather Desk's window and can be viewed in preview.
Note: the live images do not show cloud cover/activity. They do show surface terrain, city lights (night side), and other details. Cloud cover, water vapor, and similar features will be available in a future update via the "Satellite Imagery" feature.
Nexrad Radar The radar feature in this version is limited, but will allow radar images to be loaded from any radar site in the US. A future update will allow you to choose from at least 6 types of radar imagery and will have, if possible, international support.
Desktop Images This release of Weather Desk can automatically set your desktop to an updated image of the Earth (while the menu extra is open). You can set the altitude, image size, update frequency, and image source from the Preferences window.
New Buttons You should notice that several small buttons now appear below any image view. These allow you to open the image in Preview, set it as your desktop image, or visit the home page of the service from which they are being downloaded. Not all of these options are available for each image.
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