Get the latest weather updates on your desktop with WeatherMate

Planning on going out soon? Why not check the weather before you do?WeatherMate is a freeware tool that displays weather updates on your desktop.

The program starts with New York as the default location. So, unless you're from NY, the first thing you may want to do is to right-click on its system tray icon and select "Locations".

Switch to a different US state, or select International, then pick your Country and your City. Click on the add button to add the selected location to the list. You may add multiple locations to Weather Mate. Re-order the list using the arrow buttons in the Locations window, or use the remove option to delete a location from your list. The tray icon will now display the temperature at your added location. Mouse over it for additional information. But that's not the main interface of the program.

WeatherMate has a desktop window (it's like a widget) that is partially hidden at the top of the screen. Move your mouse over the line that's displayed and it expands to a small window. This pop-up shows you the weather forecast for the location. For e.g. The cloud conditions, wind speeds, etc.

Go back to the tray menu and select Current Conditions > Brief. The program's window will now display the current temperature, weather conditions, wind speed and "feels like" temperature. Switch to the Detailed Current Conditions mode, to view the humidity and pressure levels, dewpoint temperature, visibility range, sunrise and sunset times.

You can get the weather forecast from WeatherMate > Forecast menu. It has 4 options: Daily, Day by Day, Weekly Summary, Weekly Detail. Enable the daily option to see the chances of precipitation for the day in a small panel in the program's desktop window. "Day by Day" displays similar information but has 2 arrow icons that can be used to view the next or previous day's weather reports.

Weekly summary expands the window by adding a large panel with the temperature forecast for the week, and this includes different weather icons. The Show menu has toggles to display Severe Alerts, Radar Images and US Maps. WeatherMate supports multiple radars for US locations, access them from the Show > US Radars menu. It's similar to the locations window, you'll to need to select the radar you want to see and add it to the window.

Move over the program's desktop window to get more information about the weather. The status bar at the bottom of the window indicates when the program last updated the weather information. Click on the "Update" hyperlink to perform a manual refresh of the weather panel.

Don't like Imperial Units? Toggle the "Use Metric Units" option from the tray menu to view the temperature in Celsius. Adding more panels to the window makes it difficult to read at the default size. Fortunately, you can increase the size of the window from the Show > Width menu.

WeatherMate has quite a few settings that you can customize. The display section lets you set the language, toggle full location names, 24-hour clock. Adjust the desktop window's position, run the program when Windows starts, switch the autohide behavior from the Settings. The system tray icon's color is also customizable. The program plays an audio notification when a severe weather alert has been issued for a region, where it reads out the alert information. It uses Windows' speech settings as the voice. You can set it to speak the location name, severe weather alerts, current conditions, near term forecast, adjust the speech volume and speed levels.

Use the "speaker" icon at the top of the desktop window to hear the weather report at anytime. WeatherMate is available in a portable version.

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