Checking on the weather isn’t hard: you just stick your head out of the window.
‘This app makes me want to check the weather more often!’
But when the weather is unpredictable, or to keep an eye on its plans for the coming days, we turn to weather forecast apps, websites and services.
A slate of desktop weather apps are available for Linux. These range from basic terminal-based reports to indicator applets that unfurl all kinds of meteorological mumbo jumbo.
Temps is a bit different.
Temps — An Open Source Weather App
‘Temps’ is an open source desktop weather app that stands apart for others. It’s beautifully designed, cross-platform, and integrates nicely with most desktops.
It’s built using various open source technologies, including Electron, Menubar, Chart.js and OpenWeatherMap. It’s somewhat similar to Cumulus in form, but has a more inviting visual touch.
Its developer bills it as a ‘simple but smart weather app’ — ‘a lightweight and minimalistic weather menubar application for any desktop.’
The app displays the current weather conditions in any location around the world, and adds a brief forecast for the following four days too. Data-dense detail panes about barometric pressure, wind chill and humidity are eschewed in favour of the essentials.
Aside from the wonderfully minimal design, the app also sports some cool animated flourishes when displaying rain, thunder and snow conditions. This really helps to pull you in to the forecast.
Weather apps aren’t for everyone, but the design of Temps could be enough to persuade a few rainy-day reluctanteers to try it out.
Temps makes me want to check the weather more often!
Temps Features:
- Weather conditions for any location
- Four-day weather forecast
- Interactive hourly weather graph
- Timezone & auto-location support
- Animations for rain, snow and thunder
It’s Now All Sunshine, Though
As great as the app there are a couple of missing features that could really help it shine.
The first is that the app only opens when you click on it tray icon. If you click away, it closes again. A small option to let it sit on the desktop full time, like a traditional window, would, for my needs at least, work well.
Secondly, the tray icon is a little fuzzy and indistinct on Linux. It’s also hard-coded to be white, which may not match your GTK theme,
You also need to sign up for a free OpenWeatherMap API key to use it full-time as the developer is not able to pay for and offer unlimited access to weather information — but this isn’t a huge effort, and the reward is more than worth it.
If you like what you’ve seen you can hit up the official Temps website below to grab the latest download for Linux (to run just extract the .zip and double-click on the ‘temps’ file inside).