As I write this I am trying out three different weather gadgets on my desktop sidebar to see which one I will keep. Right now Accuweather says 74° (okay, I just right-clicked and selected options to see which one it was and it updated itself), MSN says 76° (jumped to 79° after I checked its options!), and the Weather Channel was at 79° and just hopped up to 81°. Well it seems that the Weather Channel one gets points for changing on its own, but which one is right? If I could just find the answer to that I would know which one to keep. The Weather Channel one, by the way, also loses points for having its logo blatantly on the gadget while the other two conserve space a little better, but then again it has more options. Sigh. Until these three, I had used WeatherBug, which not only let me choose the location but also what thermometer I wanted to use in the area from a list of 8-10. Unfortunately for some reason, after restarting the computer it would no longer connect to wherever it got its info from. And reading the comments it would seem that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. So here I am looking for a working gadget. Well, if I don’t like these three there are always more on the gadget website- seems weather gadgets are a dime a dozen.
This Vista sidebar is pretty nice. At first it had a little slideshow viewer, a clock, and an RSS headline reader (100 headlines, four at a time, and only the first few words of each one? No thanks!) in addition to its own weather gadget (similar to the MSN one, but less frills). I replaced the weather gadget, left the clock gadget- a pretty realistic looking analog clock by the way, and removed the other two. I also downloaded a CPU/RAM meter and a wireless networking meter, the latter of which is waiting on the bench for me to get a wireless router. There are also stock tools, search tools, and a lot more for the sidebar. There are even some mini-games that can be installed.
Well, looking at the weather gadgets again, the accuweather was three degrees below the next higher one, but once again I had to manually update it so this one is probably gone. However, the other two are at a three degree difference themselves- so which is right?? Sigh.
Well, if I happened to waste your time with this post I just have this to say- sorry, no refunds! 😛
Wonder if the weather channel one will be different once NBC fully takes over since they bought it…
If future updates have both NBC and Weather Channel logos I will be done with it, that’s for sure. The gadget is crowded enough as it is.
Funny stuff about not knowing the temperature. I’ve seen 3 thermometers not more than a couple of blocks apart with 3 different temperatures. Can we ever really know?
Hot or cold is good enough temperature, the rest is just a number.
I guess we can never know. I do like how the weather gadgets show not only the temp but the conditions at a glance. I usually have the blinds closed in here so I can’t see for myself. Right now both are showing rain, but in this case I already knew that having just come back from church group still having samples of the rain in my clothes…