One type of application that I use countless times every day is the “weather in the menubar” application. I’m not sure if my mild fascination with the weather is the product of being Canadian, or just a harmless personality quirk. It’s probably a bit of both.

There are a number of menubar weather applications available, though the ones that I’ve used the most up to now were After Ten’s WeatherMenu, Glu’s WeatherPop, and the open source Meteorologist. Each one of these has its pluses and minuses.

WeatherMenu used to work very well but tended to break any time its source (Weather.com) changed. Perhaps because of this fragility it is no longer supported and very badly broken. I don’t think it’s been updated in over a year so you can basically consider it deadware.

WeatherPop uses multiple information sources for more reliability (USA Today, AOL, wunderground, the U.S. National Weather Service) but lacks the depth of information that WeatherMenu or Meteorologist provides. It’s also not free if you want information from a city not covered by the U.S.-only National Weather Service. It’s only $8 US, however, though it doesn’t seem to get updated that often, and new features are very slow to come.

Meteorologist is free, uses Weather.com for its information source, and displays tons of information including radar images and multiple cities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as pretty as WeatherPop and is not available as a universal binary (optimized for both Intel and PPC macs). The kicker however is that it been seemingly abandoned by its developers — a new stable version hasn’t been released in over a year.

Thank goodness for lucky breaks and search engines

Luckily because Meteorologist is open source the code is freely available. That said, it required some massaging and a couple of other elements build before it could be compiled as a Universal Binary, After much finagling, cursing, and sacrificing of virgin bloody marys I’ve managed to build an Intel-only version, which I’ve made available for download.

A few things to note:

1. This is an Intel-only build — it will not run on PPC macs. The current version that is available from the Meteorologist web site is PPC-only and works fine, so if you’re running a G4 or G5 machine that’s where you should go.
2. This is build from the Meteorologist 1.4.4 source, so it has the same features (and bugs) as that version.
3. Here comes the bold text again; I am not a developer. Please don’t come asking me for support or send me feature requests or bugs. I don’t know Objective-C or cocoa from a hole in the ground so I can’t help you.
4. I highly recommend you disable the version checking mechanism as it will constantly tell you that a new version is available. Don’t download it as it will be the PPC version of Meteorologist 1.4.4.

Download

All of that said, here’s the download link:

» Download the Intel-only build of Meteorologist 1.4.4

Feel free to post in the comments if this works for you or not. And enjoy!

Now if only I could prod the folks at Ambrosia software to release a universal binary of Snapz Pro X…

Updated Feb. 10:

How to fix City Search in Meteorologist 1.4.4

For those of you still using PPC machines, here’s how you can fix city search in the last released version of Meteorologist.

1. Quit Meteorologist.
2. Download this file (Right-click on the link and save to your desktop).
3. Navigate in the Finder / Path Finder to where the Meteorologist application is. Make a copy of Meteorologist (just in case).
4. Right-click / control-click on Meteorologist and select “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu.
5. A new window will open with a folder called Contents showing. Open the Contents folder, and then open the Resources folder.
6. Drag and drop the weather.xml file you downloaded in step 1 into the Resources folder and confirm that you want to replace the existing file.
7. Restart Meteorologist. City search should now be working.

This seems to be working for me, but as always your mileage may vary.