15-Minute Reviews :: WeatherAloud v1.82

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is WeatherAloud version 1.82 by NextUp Techologies – A weather application that can sit in your System Tray and can be used to read out weather conditions and weather forecast.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“WeatherAloud reads weather forecasts and conditions aloud from over 7500 locations worldwide. Wake up to your local forecast, listen to hourly temperatures from your favorite vacation spot, or hear conditions where your distant loved ones are.

Frequent updates, current temperature in the system tray and complete control over when and what you hear make WeatherAloud a must for all seasons.”

Quick Pros

• Interface, while busy, is easy to navigate
• Lots of interface coloring options
• Ability to ‘schedule’ playback of weather conditions for all or specific cities handy
• Application can sit in the System Tray and provide quick-access
• Capability to save to MP3 or WAV
• Random button a fun add-on

Quick Cons

• Pesky survey window on quitting the application (Update: See note below)
• Does not fully support conversion to metric for forecasts
• Would likely be awkward for those visually-impaired for usage
• No included voices

Expansion

With so many weather applications on the market, this application nudges its way into the group, offering something a little more unique than others available; Reading of the weather aloud.

Upon launching this application, I was greeted by a yellow-on-blue interface. While the interface is a bit cluttered and has a an aged-look to it, the interface is relatively easy to get around for the most part; It is a bit awkward to remember to right-click to add cities for the first few cities for example. The interface color scheme is fully-customizable, which is handy – I did find that the yellow-on-blue scheme was difficult to read (There is a lot of information crammed onto the page after all.)

The application is straightforward; You can add new cities to your My Cities by clicking on Show Global Locations, finding your city and right-clicking – I do wish that this was easier or a series of buttons could be used however. You then can go to your My Cities page and set your default city which you’d like displayed at the top all the time. If you hit Update Ull, it updates everything. The scheduling of updates are in 5 minute blocks as well. There is also the ability to schedule the reading of either all the conditions and/or forecasts in your My Cities list (There are two schedules available for this) as well as you can schedule a specific city and its conditions and/or forecasts (There are five of these schedules available). This is handy for hourly readings of the current conditions, or daily reading of the forecast or otherwise. The scheduler can even be set up to stop reading suring certain times of day as well.

The application can be sat in the System Tray as well to continue auto reading as well as displays the current condition as the System Tray icon. From this icon as well, you can quickly right-click and select an option for reading as well; Handy for quickly checking the weather or otherwise.

An interesting feature is the ability to record to MP3 or WAV file. While the usage of this option is a bit limited, it does have potential; This could be used on a server to update the current forecast on a website that can be played back or other similar options (Could be played back over newer PBX systems for example.)

The pesky window when I quit the first time asking me to take a survey is a bit irritating; I hope this was isolated to the giveaway version. You can at least permanently disable this right in this dialog box so you don’t get pestered again by the application. Update: With the Giveaway offered on December 25th, 2007, it appears that the survey window no longer exists.

As well, this application does not fully support conversion to metric; On the author’s FAQ they admit this is because the forecast is transmitted in a text format – They do say they are working on a solution for the future.

I will say that this application is capable for visually-impaired, but still may be extremely awkward, especially when it comes to adding more cities to their list (As noting the right-click to do it.) There should maybe be an option for an increased interface size option for visually-impaired people who still have limited screen-reading capability. A simplified interface could be beneficial as well.

One final note; There is no included voices with this application; It uses SAPI voices, so you can purchase more or use the ones included with Windows; It would be nice if there were at least one high-quality voice bundled in this package; An added voice is another $20 minimum.

Final Verdict

While the application does as intended and works pretty well, I still have a few concerns for the application; It could find itself a nice market if it were more aligned for use for people whom are visually-impaired of varying degrees. While free, it may be good to pick up if you are looking for a weather tray program and would like voice support. As for paying $19.95, I would find it difficult to purchase considering it is still a ‘gadget’ and there are plenty of other weather apps (albeit without voice) available out there for free. There is an upside however; The author of the application does has a method to get this application for free by completing another offer; If you want more details, see here.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, July 26, 2007