macOS 15.2 is rolling out today (December 11), and my tech feeds are hyped with its highlights. Among the (non-AI) changes I spotted: the option to display weather info in the menu bar – native, built-in, ready to go.
Seeing a “news peg” (as they’re called), I figured I’d use that as motivation to get around to writing about Advanced Weather Companion. It’s yet-another GNOME Shell weather extension to display temperature and current conditions in the top bar.
Advanced Weather Companion doesn’t technically do anything existing weather add-ons don’t, it just surfaces information in a slightly different way.
If you click on the glanceable forecast on the panel it won’t unfurl a big block (like OpenWeather), or punt you to an app (like Weather or Not). Instead, it shows a menu of sub-menus: ‘current conditions’, ‘hourly forecast’, and ‘daily forecast’ for a 7-day lookahead.
Each grouping varies in the details it shows. But it also varies in how it formats the details too which, to be honest, is pretty annoying at first. It also makes repetitive of icons as bullet points (clock in hourly, calendar in daily) that feel incongruous and distracting.
Advanced Weather Companion will “auto-detect” your location. Alas, it doesn’t actually say anywhere in the add-on which location it is showing weather for so you’ve no idea if the weather report is accurate – rather critical for a such a tool!
The extension’s preferences has a switch for ‘Manual Setup’, along with an input field for a city. I couldn’t get this to work, neither a city name, city name plus country, or coordinates worked. The temperature unit toggle didn’t change anything either.
I stopped by the project GitHub page to check if others had experienced similar issues.
But, erm, I wasn’t sure the one linked to in extension listing was the right one given the front-page blurb is full of (clearly AI-generated) hype for features the extension does not seem to have, like multi-location support, visualisations, or a choice of weather provider.
And the trouble-shooting section on the GitHub says if no weather is shown “Verify API key”, but there is no API key input section.
‘IUNNO’ (as the yoof say).
I’m not a weather obsessive by any stretch, but the UK has endured its share of storms of late, including 80mph winds last week (I spent my Sunday fixing fences – though whether the wind blew them over or the sound of everyone’s phone blaring a warning siren, TBC).
But panel-based weather doohickeys are a mainstay of Linux desktop environments, and have been for as long I’ve been punching out typos on the topic. Options range from winterly austere to sun’s out, stats out – something for everyone, really.
Advanced Weather Companion falls somewhere in the middle of what else is out there: it’s got promise, even if its shortcomings make it a little raw (right now) to rival similar extensions.
That said, if you’ve tried other weather extensions for GNOME Shell and found them all lacking, this will be worth checking out – or at least bookmarking to keep an eye on to see if future updates bring a clearer picture to forecasts.