10 Mac Weather App Tips

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using the Weather App on your Mac. 

So the Weather App on your Mac gives you tons of information about weather whereyou are. But you can also get weather in other locations. If you look on the left you should see a sidebar. If you don't click this little button here to reveal it. At the top you've got a Search Field. You can search for any location from small town to big city around the world. Just do a quick search like this, select from the results, and you'll see the weather in that location. All the information here is filled in. The forecast, sunrise, sunset time, everything. If you want to go back to this location later you may want to add it to the list that's on the left. Click this Plus Button and it will do that. You can search for any city or location you want and then add them to the list and keep adding them. Then you can drag them around to rearrange their order. You can make this list as long as you like. To Remove one just Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on it and use Delete. 

Now you may be interested to know where the weather information comes from. Well, Apple has this support page and on it you can find a list of all of the data sources they've got. So where you're at may get if from one or more of these data sources. Like, for instance, from where I live probably it comes from the National Weather Service, but also the Weather Channel. So there's no team of meteorologists at Apple Headquarters making these forecasts. You can't blame them if it is wrong. The information comes from these sources. 

Now you may not want to run the entire Weather App just to get the current temperature. You can get that in the Menu Bar by simply going to the Apple Menu and System Settings and then going down to the Menu Bar. Look through the list of the things you can add to the Menu Bar and check Weather. Then you get this Weather indicator here with a little icon and the current temperature. Better still, you can click it and you get more information. A forecast for the next few hours and the weather in the first few of your other locations that you've added. You can click on any one of these to jump to the Weather App and go to the appropriate information. 

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Now if you want even more than that you can add a widget to appear on your Desktop behind all of your windows. So you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click here on the Desktop and choose Edit Widgets. Then scroll down to Weather and you have several different kinds of weather widgets. You've got the small ones, larger ones, and ones even with full-time day forecasts. You've got details of the current conditions, a small daily forecast one, and even a sunset and sunrise one. So, for instance, you can add this one here and it will appear on your Desktop. When you've got one in there you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on it, edit it, and change the location. This is very useful because it means you can add multiple widgets for different locations. So I can keep this widget up here, I'll add it a second time. Which doesn't seem to make sense except that I can change this one to be a different location, choose from my list here, and now I can create a little set of weather widgets for the locations I care about across the top or my screen, down the left side, or wherever I want. 

Another place that you can have widgets is in the Notification Center. When you click on the time you get the Notification Center and this will include a default Weather Widget but you can any widgets here. You can remove this one if you want. You can go to the same weather widgets here and add individual ones, like two separate ones for two different locations. Click on one and change its location here, like that. Then have these just appear in the right sidebar where they'll slide over windows rather that appear under them like they will with Desktop widgets. 

Another place you can find Weather is Spotlight. Simply use Command Space and then type Weather and you'll get the basic weather information for your location. But you can also type in and you can search for another location and if you click on that it will go to the Weather app like you did a did a search for that location there. 

You can also ask Siri. I've got type to Siri turned On but you can also use your voice and you ask for weather in any location, like that, and it will give you this same little widget here with the weather and you can click it to open up the Weather App.

But in addition to you getting the weather, the weather can come to you. In the Weather App go to Settings and then look under Notifications. Here you can setup severe weather and Next Hour precipitation notifications. You can do that for each individual location. One tip here is notice how Denver appears at the bottom but that is also my current location. I searched for and added Denver here. It only appears once in the list but that means it will now appear here in this list under Locations and when I travel Denver will appear here in the list even though it is not my current location. Of course I'd want to check on the weather back at home. 

Also, when you're looking at weather don't just look at what you see here. Everyone of these is clickable. So if you want to get more detailed information about something, like these conditions here you can click on it. There are a lot of different graphs that are shown for lots of these. For instance for precipitation. But some of them have other information. Like for instance if you go to the moon information here you've got this cool slider here. You can see the phase and rotation of the moon in the sky and a cool little calendar. If you go to averages here you'll not only see the current temperature but is it higher or lower than average and what's the range. So if you feel like it's warmer or colder than it usually is you can check. 

Then Maps has a lot of layers here that you can go to. Like, for instance, Wind. You can see these cool wind graphs here and you can zoom in and see them for your area. If you go to Precipitation or Temperature you can see lots of cool information. Precipitation will show you the radar information here, like this, and you can switch from one hour to twelve hours and then move the slider yourself and even zoom in on various areas, like this, and check to see how things are going to develop. 


So here's a bonus tip. Use Shortcuts to get specific weather information. So, for instance, here in Shortcuts I'll get a new shortcut and if I look at the Actions available under Apps here I'll see there are a lot of weather actions here. I can get the current weather, I can get the forecast, I can use Current Weather and get location or I can get a specific location, like this. When I run it you can see I get that there. I can also say Get Details and select the details so if I want the humidity now I can get that as well. You can basically create your own weather readouts. Like this. I'm going to use the Text Action to create a Text Block here. I'm going to type Temperature and then Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and Insert Variable and use Weather Conditions taking this variable and putting it here. But if I click on it once I can choose Detail and just choose Temperature, like that. So now if I run this you can see I get this readout. I can add a few more lines just like this the same way. Now you can see when I run this I get all this information here. If I go to the information about this Shortcut, I make sure Show in Spotlight is checked and provide output and I'll give it a name, like Quick Weather, like that. Now I can run this in Spotlight just by searching for Quick Weather. I can assign a quickie to it. I'll do QW. So now I can just do QW in Spotlight it will be the first thing that comes up and then Return will run it and just give me the information I want. 

So I hope you found these tips for using the Weather App on your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.