One topic you know people want information about is the weather. After all, it influences many of our decisions. Some people take advantage of the weather and decide to take the day off. Others look at the forecast and decide to unplug their computers as thunderstorms are predicted. We found a nice free utility called Weather Pulse from Tropic Designs that provides U.S. weather information in three different ways.

Like many people, I follow the weather as it is often a factor in deciding what to do. The problem I've had is some of the weather programs or sites I've tried have too much noise, mainly advertisements. Although the information was useful, I felt I had to fight to find the relevant information. In contrast, I find Weather Pulse is a better alternative.

Weather Pulse is a customizable program that provides information in three ways. The first way is called the weather desklet, which is a small translucent thumbnail that displays on your desktop. It provides a glimpse of the weather using a small graphic along with your current temperature reading. The information can update in increments between 5 minutes and 2 hours. You can modify the colors and transparency or even disable the feature.

The way I prefer is the tray tool tip. Like the desklet, if you do a mouse over you will see more details. In example below, I customized the program to include the sunset time.

The tray tool includes visual and audio alerts for severe weather conditions issued by the National Weather Service for your active city. You may also forward these alerts to one or more email addresses. If you enable email alerts, you must provide additional information in the email settings section.

As you may have gathered from the above images, the program allows you to watch multiple cities. Adding a city is as simple as entering the zip code or a city and state combination. By right-clicking the temperature icon, I can switch cities. I often look at the forecast for people I'm about to phone as I have some colleagues who are known for not being around after a certain hour if the weather is good.

Weather Pulse also provides detailed information and settings through the main desktop application. The application is accessible by clicking the icon in your system tray. This program displays various reports ranging from your current conditions to a 10-day forecast. Each report is accessible by clicking its button at the top of the program.

At the bottom of most of these reports will be a link to see a similar report at Weather.com. If you click the link, the Weather.com site will load within the application. While this is a nice feature, it needs the user to hit the Update Weather button at the top of the screen to return to the previous report. There are no back or navigation buttons.

The program also provides a wide array of weather images. These aren't as localized as some services I've seen, but you can right-click on an image and opt to go to AccuWeather.com. In this case, your default web browser opens to display their information.

While we're not fanatical about the weather such as some of our windsurfing or pilot friends, we found Weather Pulse to be a good fit for us. The program is small, unobtrusive and provides the detail we need. We suggest you try the program. Finally, if you get a severe weather alert that includes thunderstorms, we would recommend you unplug your computer and modem.

• URL: Weather Pulse Product Page
• Version Reviewed: 2.04.3
• Cost: Free but donations accepted