Review: WeatherIcon
The App Doctor’s App of the Week is WeatherIcon (free), the latest in a long line of weather-related programs for webOS. This particular app is intended to unobtrusively display your current weather by altering its icon to reflect the temperature and conditions. In this respect, its raison d'être is similar to SimpleWeather ($1) and Weather Dashboard Lite (free), both of which also attempt to serve as weather "widgets" that serve up data at a glance. Weather Dashboard runs constantly in the Notification Area, but that gets in the way if you like to clear your notifications often, as I do. SimpleWeather, of course, is not free, but it does seem comparable to WeatherIcon in both conception and implementation.
For its intended purpose, WeatherIcon is a great option. By virtue of its information-rich icon, it can even make the Wave Launcher useful, if you deem it worthy of one of the 4 spots on the LaunchBar, allowing you to check weather without interupting even a full screen video (Wave Launcher unfortunately does not work during 3D games). Launching the app reveals a well-featured weather app with a 3-day forecast, although it lacks satellite/ radar maps. App settings include update interval (settable down to the minute), location (either via zip code or real-time GPS update), and whether to show a notification banner during updates. Incidentally, it sports the best looking launch screen I've seen to date (I won't spoil the surprise). I set it to update weather info every 30 minutes, and I personally have not noticed any additional battery drain on my Sprint Pre (which already polls twitter and facebook every 15 minutes). Overall, WeatherIcon gives us one fewer reason to ever look out the window.
