The notification displays information about the precipitation, e.g. snow fall or rain, as well as its reach and strength.

A click opens the rain alarm website with a Google Maps view of the selected location. Here you find precipitation data over time, a local weather map so to speak. You can zoom in and out of the map which seems to be completely independent of the browser extension. Users who just want to use rain alarm this way can open the website to do just that.

The website offers precipitation data of the last two hours. You can go back or forward in time to see the intensity at a specific period in time.

The Rain Alarm options can be used to change the location for the weather forecasts and warnings automatically or manually. There is unfortunately no option to use multiple profiles for different locations in the world. Only one location can be active at a time.

Text notifications can be turned off, and sound notifications turned on here as well. Other options include changing the search radius and interval, the sensitivity which defines when alarms get triggered automatically, the time format and units of measurement.

Rain Alarm can be a handy extension for Chrome users who need to be in the known all the time. It is not a full blown weather extension though, but if precipitation is what you want, then this is what you get.

Are you using weather services or weather extensions? Let me know in the comments.

The free portable application sWeather has been released as part of Donation Coder’s fundraising event in March. The application has been designed to display local weather information in the Windows system tray and the program window. It is therefor a handy alternative for users who look up weather reports regularly on the Internet.

Configuration is a little bit complicated, as it uses WOEID information used by Yahoo Weather. A WOEID, or Where On Earth ID, is used by Yahoo Weather to determine locations in the world.

Users therefor need to enter a place’s WOEID to get local weather reports for that location. To do that they need to visit the Yahoo Weather website and enter their location or zip in the form near the top of the page.

The last part of the url of the page that displays the weather information on Yahoo is the WOEID.

http://weather.yahoo.com/united-states/new-york/new-york-2459115/

The WOEID for New York is 2459115.

This ID needs to be entered for every location that the user wants to access weather reports for.

Locations are added in the configuration which is accessed via the Options menu at the top of the program window.

Users can add as many locations as they want provided that they have the WOEID at hand. The local weather app uses non-metric units by default which can be switched in the options as well.

The app displays the local weather report of one location at a time, with the option to switch between all configured locations with the mouse (click or mouse-wheel) or keyboard shortcuts (left, right or up, down).

Weather information are detailed and include different information next to the location’s current temperature. Among the information are a weather forecast for the next day, the “felt-temperature”, the humidity and wind strength.

The application window can be closed without losing access to the weather information. The system tray icon displays the current temperature and current condition in icon form.

It is not possible to switch locations if the app is minimized. For that, it would need to be opened again with a double-click on the system tray icon.

Interested users can download the sWeather application directly from Skwire’s Empire over at the DCMembers website. The program is portable and should work on most editions of the Windows operating system. It was tested on a 64-bit Windows 7 edition.

Local time can be very important in these circumstances and probably several else. There are a lot of software programs and browser add-ons that display multiple time zones to the user. Firefox users for example can install the excellent computer alarm clock and timer Simple Timer which displays a clock in the Firefox status bar.

Localti.me is an online service. The major benefit of it is the fact that it can be used to quickly look up the local time, local data and local weather without installing and software or plugin. All it takes is to enter a country, state or region to get the requested information. The service will display suggestions as soon as the user begins typing in the name.

The results page will list the local time, local data and local weather along with other information about the selected location. These other information include maps (taken from Virtual Earth), Wikipedia information, the latest headlines, traveling information and pictures taken from Flickr and Panoramio.

Localti.me (via Make use of) is a nice to have service for quickly looking up the local time, date or weather of a location in the world.