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OS X weather widget sucks for UK - why?

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I live in Stroud in the UK. The default OS X weather widget using AccuWeather is useless for the UK. All temperatures, at the very least, are wildly high - let alone the accuracy of the weather conditions. Add to this that there are a very small number of cities in the UK supported, so you can’t get anything close to where you are.

How do I know this? Well you can install the free weather widget that uses the BBC weather data (using some really ugly webscraping - evil!).

BBC Weather widget has reports for Stroud. The OS X default Widget has Cardiff as the closest city to Stroud - it is 63 miles away. Here’s the current screen grab showing the two reports side by side (at the same moment in time).

Compare and contrast. Apple - please sort this embarrassment out. Its not so bad on the desktop as you can always install something else like the BBC widget, but on the iPhone the problem cannot be worked around, the weather widget is close to useless. Interestingly, the same Cardiff weather on my iPhone reports temperatures much closer to the BBC widget’s Cardiff stats, at the same point in time as the above desktop screen grab.

However even on the iPhone you still can’t choose a city truly close to your location unless you’re in one of the few major metropolitan areas of the UK. Very lame.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Moving to Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “OS X weather widget sucks for UK - why?”

  1. Scott Vlaminck Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    Just out of curiosity, I’d be interested to see a screen grab of this side-by-side: OSX Widget at Cardiff, BBC Widget for Cardiff, BBC Widget for Stroud. :-)

  2. ross callon Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 12:40 am

    We live near Boston Massachusetts. Our weather widget on the OSX dashboard returns the weather for Boston Georgia. I didn’t even know that there was a Boston in Georgia. This is indeed something that Apple needs to fix.

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