Weather Bug, You’re On Probation
April 15th, 2006For years I’ve used WeatherBug. It has been a handy utility for telling me about the weather I miss while I sit all day in a windowless room looking a LCD screens.
But lately I’ve started to become irritated with my old friend the Weatherbug. The application has become more intrusive and larger, at the same time its actual content has been reduced in favor of more ads. In particular Weatherbug removed sunrise, sunset, and moon phase from their display. I kind of like to know where I am with respect to the sun and moon, so I missed that.
I don’t begrudge them the ads, they have to make a living. But there should be more content than ads. Weatherbug has more ads than content. Weatherbug started as a simple rectangular dialog application with a good summary of weather data and a bit of advertising. Now it is huge monster with all sorts of flashing geegaws and gimcracks.
Yesterday FireFox updated itself, and in the process of the update it suggested some good extensions. One was Accuweather’s Firefox extension. It ads some icons to the bottom of Firefox that are similar to what Weatherbug ads to the Windows system tray (more correctly know as the ‘notification area’). When moused over, these icons display little windows with useful weather information in them. If you click on an Accuweather icon you get a web page that has more weather information than advertising. The Accuweather extension lets you specify that the weather page appear in a new tab, and that it not steal focus. That’s a very thoughful feature. Best of all, you get good sun and moon data with Accuweather.
Weatherbug has only two advantages. It has a network of weather stations in schools, so you get weather close to your physical location. Accuweather just shows data for all of your city. And the weatherbug icon displays the temperature in the tray, with Accuweather you have to mouse over its icon. On the other hand, Weatherbug has a low signal to noise ratio. It’s always beeping and flashing, usually for no reason. Weatherbugs data is hard to dig out of all the visual junk that surrounds it.
I’m using both right now, but Weatherbug is on probation for sure.
Thanks for the information on the Firefix extension. I like it. Weatherbug is dead.
thanks for your comments, Jim. I’ve forwarded them to our product team for consideration as we continue to build out improvements to our program.
You can still get sunrise/sunset, humidity, dewpoint, moonphase, and lots of other information by clicking the “More Information” button at the bottom of the main screen.
In addition to having a network of 8000 LOCAL stations, mostly at schools, as you mentioned, the other huge difference between us and every other weather program is that our data updates LIVE, every 2 seconds, instead of once an hour like all other weather apps. So when you are looking at weather from an airport 30 miles away, it’s not even “live” weather that’s dozens of miles away, it could be up to 1 hour old.
That’s one of the reasons that the Dept. of Homeland Security (through the Homeland Security Initiative) and dozens of city, county and state emergency mgmt centers use our program and rely on it in emergencies. Getting old date from miles away just isn’t going to help much in an emergency.
Thanks for your support of WeatherBug- feel free to drop me an email and I’ll update you on some of the new products we’re working on.
sincerely, Jay Hoffman, WeatherBug customer support team manager
Jay, thanks for pointing out the advantages of Weatherbug. There is doubt that there is lots of useful information. The question is if Weatherbug’s very very noisy visual presentation drowns the useful information out.