Weather HD is a popular weather application for iPhone and iPad by development studio vimov which, unlike most weather tools that display current conditions and weekly forecasts through icons and data sets on screen, comes with a selection of beautifully animated videos that depict the weather conditions of your location. Weather HD animates a cloudy and dark sky when a thunderstorm is coming, and lets you view a green field with grass moving in front of you in case of a windy but sunny summer day. If you’ve tried the iPad app last year, you know what to expect – a very few numbers, lots of video and animations.
The Mac version of Weather HD, released today, takes where the iOS counterparts left off to offer even more videos, and bigger ones with new scenarios and conditions. The app is a 225 MB download for a reason: it’s full of video content that will be displayed on your Mac’s screen as soon as you enter your ZIP code or city name. In the Mac app, though, there’s more than the iPad version. You can set up notifications to be alerted when temperature drops below a certain amount of degrees, and quickly check out the hourly forecasts from an icon in the menubar. You can enter multiple locations, as well as choose to run the app in windowed or fullscreen mode. In the main screen, animated forecasts run on the right panel, and a series of tabs in the upper left hand corner get you access to a slew of other functionalities. You can check out severe conditions and moon phases in-app, or switch to the Map view and apply different layers on your location like clouds, temperature, humidity and wind. When you’re done, the additional panel slides back to reveal video forecasts in their full glory again.
Weather HD has never been an app for weather professionals and geeks, but the Mac app packs more features than its iOS siblings. Videos look good, and whether or not the whole concept can become annoying after a few days of usage it’s totally up to you. But at $3.99, I think vimov is off to another success in the App Store.
