Using the New Mac Weather App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Weather App for the Mac and iPad.

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Now macOS Ventura adds a new app called Weather and it gives you access to all this weather information. The same app is on the iPad. They are virtually identical and they are both very similar to the app we've had for a long time on the iPhone. But of course the iPhone smaller screen is going to make everything look a little different. But the information is the same. 

So here's the Weather App on the Mac. So you should see a sidebar here on the left with a list of locations. If you don't you can click this button here at the top left that will bring up or hide the sidebar. Then on the right you'll see all this weather information for whatever location is selected. So the first item here should be My Location as long as you don't have Location Services turned Off for the Weather App. Then it can't tell where you are. Otherwise you would have to click on one of the locations that you have listed here and then you get tons of weather information. Now it may be useful to have several locations here. Maybe you have friends and relatives in other locations and want to know what the weather is like for them. Maybe you travel a lot between locations and you want to have a list here. To add a new location just type the name of the location and you should be able to find most cities and small towns throughout the world. Then select from the list and it will bring up the weather information for that location. Now you can just use it like this. Just doing a search and getting the information there. But if you want to add it to the left sidebar then click the Add button here and it will add it to the list. You can add as many as you like. Just Search and then Add. Search and Add. So now you have easy access to different locations by just clicking on the items on the left sidebar. You can also Click and Drag a location to change the order here. If you Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad, on one of these you can Delete it. I'll show you another way to add locations in a few minutes.

Now the main weather information is here at the top. You see the current temperature and you see the high and low for today. If you want to switch the units for temperature go to View and you can switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Now each one of these modules here can be clicked on to get more info. So, for instance, here's the forecast for the entire day. You can see all these hours. You can see the sunset time, you can see symbols or what the weather is going to be like then and the proximate temperature throughout that hour. If you click here it will bring up more information and you can see a graph here that shows you the temperature throughout the day and the weather how it changes. You can see symbols at the top as well. You can move your pointer over it. You can switch to the next day and see the prediction for that day and the day after or click on one of the dates like that. You can look at the bottom and you can see the written out forecast as well. To dismiss this just click somewhere else.  Notice here you can scroll a bit so you can see this little arrow here to the right of the hourly temperatures. I can use two-fingers on my trackpad or one on the surface of the Apple Mouse and scroll over. If you click on the ten-day forecast on a certain day, like say Thursday here, you can see it jumps right to Thursday and you get the chart for that day. 

You can click on any module. So here's Air Quality and you could see the number here and a description. You click here and it will give you more information. The same thing here for UV Index. Most of these will give you a chart here. Sunset, you get the height of the sun right here and sunset, sunrise, all of that. There's wind and you'll get a forecast for that. Same thing for precipitation. Feels like temperature, a lot of us know it as Wind/Chill is here. At the bottom of some of these it even gives you descriptions of what these mean. Here's humidity and it will give you the dew point as well. You can see descriptions here at the bottom so you can learn about what these mean. Here is visibility and air pressure as well. 

Now a very special one, of course, is the map here at the top right. So if you click on that then it will expand the map. It won't completely push everything out of the way. You can see how everything is dynamics now listed on the left. Now you can see the precipitation map and it gives you this timeline here at the bottom that will move and you can pause it, you can reposition it by just clicking or dragging here at the bottom. You can switch from 12 hour forecast to next hour forecast like this and you can see how it moves a lot slower. You can zoom in and out. You can use two-fingers on a trackpad for this but you can also use the Plus and Minus buttons as well. But the map can also show you other things. If you click this Layers button here you can switch from precipitation to temperature. Now you can see a Temperature Map. You could also switch to air quality to see an Air Quality map. To shrink the map back just click the x button at the top left of it and it shrinks back like that.

Note that since everything here is dynamic if you shrink this window down notice how it changes so everything is still there. The boxes just fit together differently. Another interesting thing about the map is you can add locations by using the map. So let's pause this here and let's zoom in and let's say we want to add Chicago here. You can right click and you get the ability to add the location or just to go view it like you were doing a search for it. 

Now one thing I know that people often wonder about is what do these bars mean here in the ten-day forecast. Well here's what is going on with these. It's a ten-day forecast so the first thing you need to look at is what is the lowest temperature for the week. In this case it is 26 degrees right here. Now what is the highest temperature. In this case it is 71 degrees. So all the bars for all ten days are going to go from 26 degrees on one end to 71 on the other. But then on each individual day the coloring you will see only stretches for the low and high for that day. So since this day here goes from 37 to 71 you could see it doesn't color in the left side from 26 to 37. It starts at 37 and it goes all the way up to 71. The dot represents the current temperature. So you only see it on today. So if you look at another day, like for instance Friday, Friday starts at 26 degrees, the lowest point for the week, so the portion of the bar that is colored in is all the way to the left. It only goes up to the 46 degree mark here, the high temperature for that day. So by looking at the colored portions of the bar you can quickly get an idea of how the week is going to go. You can see it's going to be the warmest today, it is going to get cooler and warm again and then cool off again. If you want to focus on the left side of the colored bars you can see all the lows and the right side of the colored bars and you can see all of the highs. Then the colors themselves just represent temperature. So blues are colder and then yellows and reds are warmer.

Now another thing to think about is where the data comes from. It comes from a variety of sources. Apple doesn't have its own department of meterologists and weather stations throughout the world. They are licensing the data from other companies. So if you go to Weather about weather here you'll see there's a link for weather data. Click on that and it will take you to a webpage where you can see the sources right here for weather data from around the world.

So it was supposed to get up to 71 today but it only got up to 65, it is the weather source, not Apple, that predicted that. You can figure out the source and blame them and chances are if you looked at other forecasts at different websites and news sources you would have found the same forecast.

Now this can also explain why you may not see all the same weather data that I'm showing. For instance, the local weather in your area may not include things like air quality index. Or it may not have all the same layers in the map. Weather apps are only going to be able to show you the information included from your local weather data source. 

Now the Weather App can also send you notifications. If you go to Weather, Settings it is all about Notifications here. So you can have for your current location and for any locations you've added you can have Notifications turned On for severe weather and you could have just next hour precipitation notifications come in. So use the checkboxes here for any of those. Note here not all locations have all Notifications. Here you can see for Tokyo there's no next hour precipitation alerts. Now if these are all disabled that is probably because in System Settings, under Notifications, and then Weather you've got Notifications turned Off for the Weather App. So make sure that is turned On. Make sure the Notifications are set to Banners or Alerts and then make sure Critical Alerts, Time Sensitive Alerts and all of that are turned On as you like. 

Another thing to pay attention to is the Background Graphic. So here you can see it is sunny and clear in Denver. If I go to another location like Paris you can see it is partly cloudy. It is also partly cloudy in Philadelphia. In Tokyo it is nighttime and partly cloudy.  In Eureka, OR it is currently raining. Notice the detail here. The rain is even splashing on top of the boxes. 

Now note you still have Weather here in Notification Center. If I click here you may see a weather widget. You can, of course, scroll to the bottom, Edit widgets and then go to Weather and then there is a variety of weather widgets you can add to the right side. If you go to Notification Center and you click on any of the weather widgets it will now take you to the Weather App. Previously it would take you to the website. You can also check the weather in Spotlight. So you can type weather in a location like that and you can see one of the options you get is weather. Click on it and it will take you right to weather information here in Spotlight. You could also use Siri. (Weather in Philadelphia; currently cloudy and 64 degrees in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.). Now if you are into programming another place you can get weather data is in the Shortcuts App. So you can create a new Shortcut here. You can search for weather. You can see the App is there. There is various things you can get. So I can get, say, the current weather and I can change the location if I want. Then I can get details. So put that there as the next step. What detail do I want? Let's go for the Sunset Time. Then if I run this shortcut you can see the results here are going to give me that information. So if you embellish this a lot you can create your own little weather shortcut that will give you the information you want quickly and you can access that in Spotlight, Siri, in the Dock if you want, here in the Menu Bar if you want as well. 

So that's a look at using the Weather App on your Mac and iPad. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.