Tray Weather

Desktop weather applications are often hit-or-miss, as they either don’t offer enough information or are much too bloated. If you’re looking for a free, lightweight program that still comes with an impressive feature set, Tray Weather may be just what you need.

An open-source application that obtains weather data from OpenWeatherMap, it features a streamlined design while still providing detailed forecasts, and it even includes weather maps.

Tray Weather is very easy to configure, but you will need an OpenWeatherMap account in order to obtain an API key; it’s free, and this step only needs to be completed once. Your location will be detected automatically, so you don’t need to worry about that.

Once everything has been set up, you can place the mouse cursor over the system tray icon to view the current temperature and weather description in a tooltip. At night, the icon changes to display the current moon phase.

If you want a bit more information, you just need to double-click the system tray icon. The application will display a complete report that includes temperature, cloud cover, humidity, pressure and wind speed.

What’s more, you can view a forecast for the upcoming week, which lists the predicted temperature, humidity, cloud cover, pressure and rain accumulation in the form of a graph.

The local temperature, rain accumulation, cloud cover and wind speed can be viewed on a map within the main UI. You can select which of these parameters you wish to analyze and choose between two map types.

Since this feature uses up quite a bit more memory than the rest of the application, you also have the option of disabling it at any time.

Overall, OpenWeatherMap is a relatively simple yet very impressive program that comes with a decent set of features and bundles them into a very intuitive, streamlined UI.