Seven Ways To Quickly View Weather On Your Mac

While your apps like News and Stocks have moved from iOS to the Mac, there is no default Weather app for the Mac. But you can get weather information quickly and easily using Spotlight, Safari, the Dashboard, Notifications Center and Siri. You can also bookmark or create a shortcut to your favorite weather source or get a third-party app.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
So with a lot of apps, like Stocks and News and Home, coming from iOS to Mac OS with Mojave there's one that you may miss. It's the Weather app. Where's the Weather app on your Mac. Well, it turns out that while you don't have an app dedicated to weather there's so many different ways to get the weather on your Mac that are even simpler than running an app.

Let's start off by looking at just using Spotlight. I'm going to use Command Space, the best way to bring up Spotlight. Here I can just type weather and it will bring up the weather for my local area. Now, if I don't want it to be my local area I can continue typing. You can see it says in Denver, Colorado. Say if I said in San Francisco. You can see this is going to work and it's going to bring up San Francisco weather. I can also use zip codes. So, for instance, I can bring up Philadelphia by typing in zip code I know that is in that city. So you can easily get weather here. You can scroll down to see it and if you want to jump to the web page you can click here at the bottom. But this isn't the only place that you can bring up weather.

You can also get weather in Safari. So up at the top instead of typing a search term just type weather and I type in the name of a city or it will just default to local. It'll bring up weather right there. I can click on it to then jump to Weather.com. So that's another quick way to do it.

Now you also have the Notifications bar here on the right. Under Today I've got widgets. One of the widgets, typically, is weather. So here I've got weather listed for three different cities. I can click i there and I can remove a city. I can add a city. These would be the ones that I see here. If I wanted to get information on any one of these I can click on it and it's going to go and open up weather.com again. So this is a really easy way to bring up weather. Of course I can Edit in here and I can move this to the top if it's important to me.

Another place you can find Weather is in the Dashboard. So go to System Preferences and under Mission Control you can set if you want Dashboard to be Off, as a Space, or as an Overlay. As a space it will be the left most space. As an overlay it appears over everything else. So let's do it as an overlay. You can see the keyboard shortcut is F12. I'll use F12 to bring it up and there you can see my Dashboard. There is a weather widget. I've got an Information button there. I can hit i and I can change the city for it. So it's another place you can see the weather. I can also click on it to shrink it or expand it.

Another place you can find weather is using Siri. Weather. Siri says, here's the weather today. You can see it brings up the same widget that you would see in Notifications Center over there. Of course you can ask Siri for the weather somewhere else. Weather Chicago. Siri says, here's the weather for Chicago, Illinois today.

Of course you can also go to any website that you want. So you can go, for instance, to forecast.weather.gov for the National Weather Service. You can look up your local weather and you can bookmark it or you could even drag the URL to the desktop to use as a little shortcut that you can get to pretty quickly.

If none of these appeal to you, you do have the option to get a Weather app. So there are a bunch of different weather apps if you search for Weather in the Mac App Store. You'll find a bunch of different weather apps that you can get on your Mac. Some of them are free. Some of them cost a little bit. So you can find one that fits your needs.

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