Flannery O’Connor once wrote a short story called “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” If O’Connor was to write a story today, it would more likely be called “A Good Weather App Is Hard to Find.” Weather is hard to predict accurately, and finding an app that offers both an attractive interface and solid predictions is a tall order. If you’re looking for an app that fits both criteria for your Mac, Live! Weather is an option you might want to consider.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

Live! Weather is a weather app. The background is a photo of your area. The app predicts weather conditions, temps, wind conditions, and precipitation.

Pros

• Gorgeous images of your city of choice
• See current temps, highs and lows, windspeed, and chance of precipitation all at a glance

Cons

• Somewhat limited city selection abilities: in the free version, you can only have three cities set. And even if you do upgrade to the full version for $1.99, you can still only have 15 cities. That’s enough for most people, but certainly not all.
• No full screen version, and no widget/menu bar component to allow for quick reference
• Can’t view hourly and weekly forecasts at the same time
• App was a bit sluggish and laggy at times
• Searching by ZIP code doesn’t work, nor does searching by city and state: you have to search by city/town name ONLY
• Not all cities have gorgeous photos associated with them (but the default background isn’t terrible)
• No long-form text predictions for weather, windspeed, or precipitation: sometimes, text is more helpful than numbers and icons
• No long-term forecasts beyond the one-week mark

Discussion

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That being said, Live! Weather is a very attractive app. The photos used as the backgrounds for the various cities are very pretty and vibrant, though not all cities will have a photo that gets pulled in to use as a background. But it’s not just the background that provides beauty: the font stylings are very lovely, as is the overall UI.

Despite being pretty, there were some aspects of the UI that I wasn’t crazy about. You can’t go full-screen, and you can’t see both weekly and hourly forecasts at the same time, despite the fact that there is more than enough room to place them side to side. I wish I could customize the interface.

In addition, the interface got laggy, particularly when adding a new city to your list. I also wish I could have more than 15 cities in my list after upgrading. With the gorgeous backgrounds, adding new cities is really addictive, just for curiosity’s sake.

Conclusion and download link

It’s early days for this app, which is currently on version 1.0.3. That means there is plenty of time to clean up some of this app’s issues, making it more useful, user-friendly, and unique. It’s a fine tool now, and it’s worth checking it out. That being said, there’s not a lot here to differentiate this app from its competitors.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 1.0.3

Supported OS: OS X 10.7 or later

Download size: 2.4 MB

Live! Weather on Apple App Store