Sometimes a solid, old idea can be livened up with a little something extra. Horizon Calendar—a $2 calendar app for the iPhone by developer Kyle Rosenbluth—offers a little something extra, and it’s a beauty: The weather.

Once you’ve entered the time and place of an upcoming appointment in your Horizon calendar, the app shows you what the weather will be like at the location of that entry. While the forecasts only appear for the two weeks closest to the current date, it’s a feature that makes Horizon very helpful for parents wondering whether to pack an umbrella for that field trip, or business travelers unsure how to pack their bags for that weeklong trip to the coast.

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The Netatmo Weather Station is described as “the first personal weather station for iPhone & iPad.” The Weather Station itself consists of two pieces of hardware, and the company provides a free iOS app for accessing weather data from these devices.

Like a standard weather station, the Netatmo Weather Station has an indoor module and an outdoor one. Each module is a sleek-looking aluminum and white-plastic cylinder; the indoor module is six inches tall, with its outdoor counterpart about four inches tall. The indoor module needs to be plugged into a power outlet, while the outdoor module uses four AAA batteries. Though the battery power means you can place it anywhere, you must position the outdoor module in a location that’s in range of your Wi-Fi network.

To set up the Weather Station, first you connect a USB cable from an iOS device (running the Netatmo app) to the indoor module; the app transfers your Wi-Fi-network settings and credentials from your iOS device to the indoor module so it can access your network. The outdoor module is pre-paired with the indoor module, so after tapping a few setup buttons and screens, the entire weather station is up and running.

The Weather Station gets your geographic location from your iPhone, so the system is able to determine your exact altitude for calibrating its barometric-pressure sensor. In addition to pressure, the Weather Station measures temperature, humidity, and, for the indoor module only, CO2 and ambient noise level.

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Most weather apps try to convince you to ditch the default Weather offering in iOS by adding more features. Solar takes the opposite approach, stripping down its weather report to essentially offer time, temperature, and condition-appropriate color patterns. Whether Solar tops what you already get for free from Apple’s built-in app depends on the value you place on aesthetics.

Because make no mistake: Solar is an awfully pretty app, relying on what it calls “Rothko-esque colorscapes” to not only tell you what the temperature is but to also depict current conditions. That’s Rothko, as in Mark Rothko, the abstract expressionist painter known for his use of color. A typical Solar screen stacks colors on top of each other; cooler temperatures have a bluish hue, while the colors become more orange and red as the mercury rises. Besides the handy visual reference, the app also displays time and temperature.

In an especially useful touch, Solar takes advantage of your phone’s location-awareness features to always dispay the temperature for where you are. You can also add cities on your own, storing up to 20 locations within the app.

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As someone who works from a home office, up-to-the-minute weather data isn’t something I’m usually obsessed with. Yet I’m frequently reminded of the weather by reader emails asking for a good Mac app for keeping an eye on conditions. (These are healthy reality checks for me.)

There’s no shortage of Mac weather apps—a Mac App Store search for “weather” returns 76 results at the time of this writing, including the excellent Swackett, which we reviewed last summer. But many of these are either front-and-center apps like Swackett, which use a standard window and require your full attention; “take over the desktop” apps, like the standout Weather HD, that replace your desktop with a detailed weather report; or menu-bar apps that either clutter your menu bar or require you to click to view the weather. (There’s always Dashboard, but let’s see a show of hands: How many of you have used Dashboard in the past six months?) Quite a few readers have asked for a recommendation for a more-subtle option for checking the weather at a glance.

I’ve been testing WeatherMin (Mac App Store link), and while it doesn’t have as many features as some other Mac weather apps, it provides the basics—the current weather conditions, and (optionally) a basic forecast—in an elegant display that’s always available without dominating your screen. (At this time, WeatherMin works only in the U.S., as it uses weather data from the National Weather Service. The developer is considering support for other locations in future versions.)

Launch WeatherMin, and it asks to use your location; you can approve this request, or you can open the app’s preferences window and manually provide your location. The program then provides a semi-transparent display, hovering over your desktop, that shows the current weather in your location. You can move this display anywhere on your screen, and WeatherMin’s preferences window lets you choose the display’s size, text color, and transparency, as well as whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius for temperatures.

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Talking about the weather is so mundane it’s almost a cliche. But Weathermob is looking to change that with Weathermob, the company’s namesake app that’s taken weather small-talk to the next level by creating a network of weather-minded users around the globe.

Launch the app, and you’re greeted with a graphic showing the current forecast for your area. The graphic depicts the current temperature, weather conditions—sunshine, fog, rain, and so forth—and an emoticon meant to correspond with those conditions.

Like any good weather app, you can use Weathermob to get the forecast for your current location. Hit forecast, and you can view both an eight-day outlook and an hourly forecast. Navigate to the Latest tab, and you can view real-time updates from other users. Hold down Latest to toggle between real-time updates from other users in your current location or around the world. Once in World mode, you can choose to view a real-time stream of updates or you can search for updates by specific locations.

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Some may scoff at the need for a built-in app on the iPhone to tell you about current weather conditions—there’s this fantastic new invention called a window that you can look out of and see what the weather’s like—but I find it quite useful. Will I need a coat when I go outside or is it warm enough for a short-sleeved shirt? This unseasonably warm weather—just how hot is it right now? Just a few taps, and I can get exact temperature information I couldn’t gather with just the naked eye.

There’s one problem, though—those few taps. To actually get that at-a-glance information, I’ve got to launch the built-in Weather app, wait for it to load, and then find out how hot or cold it currently is. That’s not a huge investment of time, obviously, but I’d like to be able to just glance at my phone to get the temperature as easily as I do the time.

That’s the main problem Fahrenheit looks to solve. The universal app from International Travel Weather Calculator pushes the current temperature to the home screen of your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad—the temperature, which is tied to your home location, appears as an alert badge over the Fahrenheit logo, just like the alert badges that appear on apps like Messages and Mail.

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Weather apps for the iPhone and iPad can be roughly divided into three categories: 1) those that provide detailed weather information and forecasts that can also be found on the Web, for free, such as the offerings by Accuweather and The Weather Channel; 2) those that provide detailed and specific meteorological information for people interested in aviation, skiing (snow reports), hurricanes, and sea conditions; and 3) those that provide basic weather info and (relatively) short-range forecasts, often served up with eye candy.

Weather+ falls squarely into the third category—the $1 offering from International Travel Weather Calculator is a beautiful, well-designed app.

One download from the App Store includes slightly different versions for the iPhone and iPad. On both devices, you get basic time, temperature, humidity, and precipitation forecasts, for as many locations as you’d like. Each screen provides data for one location, and you can choose to display all of the information available through the app—the current time and conditions, a five-day forecast and three-hour details for the current day—or as little as just the time and current conditions.

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Expenditure from Shape is a simple little app that helps you track and organize your finances with a minimum of fuss. But the $2 offering lacks some of the features of its free competitors, even if is a little easier to use.

Entering expenses and income on the app isn’t complicated, and Expenditure lets users attach photos and notes to remind them where their money went. You can pre-program recurring expenses and paychecks, making it simple to keep a running tally of how much money you have available. That number is featured in a large font size whenever you launch Expenditure.

The problem? Expenditure is entirely self-contained. There’s no way to export data from your iPhone to your computer, or vice versa. Free offerings like Pageonce Bills and Mint.com let you access your data via the Web from desktop computers, at least. They also plug into your online banking and bill-paying accounts. Expenditure lacks these features.

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For finding out the weather across the country or across the street, Weather Underground’s free WunderMap proves to be an excellent addition to your iPad. The app provides all kinds of detailed weather information from live feeds, including wind and air conditions, severe weather alerts, webcams, and even an animated radar/satellite time lapse. Its interface fits seamlessly over Google Maps, offering a comfortable balance between simplicity and functionality that makes WunderMap useful for both casual and advanced users.

WunderMap doesn’t have any more features than it needs. Select a location via the search bar, point and zoom in the crosshairs (at any range from global view to Street View), tap the My Location button, or just choose a spot from your bookmarks. An unobtrusive panel window provides three pages of weather info that you can flip through, featuring detailed info about current conditions; today’s conditions at three-hour intervals; and a two-week summary forecast.

The map itself is interactive and informative. WunderMap’s simple menu allows you to enable and disable various overlays—such as precipitation, clouds, severe weather, webcams, temperature and wind—that all appear stacked but visible on the interactive map. One option even animates the radar graphics as they’ve changed over the course of the day. Since the app is powered by Google Maps, the menu also lets you switch between street, satellite, and hybrid views. The only thing missing here is an integrated itinerary, which would actually be quite a useful feature.

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How does Apple cram so much graham into Golden Grahams functionality into iTunes? Can severe weather alerts on your mobile warn you of snaps, crackles, and pops (caused by lightning)? And silly Facebook, HTML5 is for kids. We’re cuckoo for the remainders for Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Apple Said To Prepare ITunes Changes To Improve Sharing (Bloomberg)

Apple may have finally learned the same lesson that most of us picked up back in elementary school: Sharing is caring. According to Bloomberg, the company is planning an extensive overhaul of its iTunes software to add better integration with iCloud, improve media management and discovery, and even allow sharing. These changes will even be reflected in iTunes’s new animated icon.

Weather alerts coming soon to smartphone near you (Associated Press)

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Rival weather apps from The Weather Channel and AccuWeather have been revamped with iOS 5 compatibility and updated graphics that give your local weather the look of a top-flight video game.

Version 3.0 of The Weather Channel for iPad launched on Thursday, with new animated backgrounds depicting your local weather conditions, a feature reminiscent of the MLB.com At Bat 11 effort—but one that is only available for users of the iPad 2.

Users of original iPads will have access to the app’s other features, though, including a spinning globe that offers quick glances of weather around the world, as well as customizable weather maps. The emphasis on graphics may be why the app gobbles up a hefty 89.4 MB of storage space—not as much as an HD video game for iPad, perhaps, but more than 10 times the amount used by AccuWeather’s tablet apps. That made for a lengthy wait when I downloaded the app this morning.

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In a world crowded with weather apps, Wx has managed to stand out: The desktop weather-tracking program was named one of Macworld's Mac Gems in 2009. Now the program is available for the iPad.

Wx for iPad was launched Sunday by developer Craig Hunter. The app offers current conditions, forecasts, severe-weather alerts and radar pictures from the XML feeds supplied by 1,700 National Weather Service weather stations. Users can enter their zip codes to get information feeds for up to 18 locations, along with data from nearby radar sites and alerts from local municipalities.

The app is $4 and is compatible with iPads running iOS 3.2 or later.

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Instead of relying on icons, the app uses high-definition video clips to reflect the weather. The new iPhone version of the app incorporates all those videos, scaled down to fit the smaller screen. Weather HD shows the current temperature and weather conditions as well as forecasts, and it lets you swipe between multiple cities if you're the kind of person who tracks weather around the globe.

The iPhone version of the app is optimized for the iPhone 4’s Retina display. And since the app is universal, folks who already own the iPad edition can freely install it on their iPhones, too.

Weather HD costs $1 and requires an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 3.2 or higher.

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Clink Apps on Thursday released The Weather 2, a major upgrade to its iPhone and iPad app that brings a significantly redesigned interface, iOS 4 and iPhone 4 support, background updating, and new customizability.

The Weather 2 displays the typical data you’d probably expect from a weather app, though its new interface brings an emphasis on clarity and flexibility, allowing you to see just the data that’s important to you. A new icon toolbar lets you swap between pages of specific data like the week’s forecast, the area’s radar, or the current temperature.

You can also add new pages to The Weather 2 and customize them with widgets for ten types of data, such as air pressure, visibility, humidity, a “feels like” rating (if one is available for your area), wind speed, forecast, and more. These features work generally the same way between the iPhone and iPad versions, with just basic differences to take better advantage of the iPad’s screen real estate. For example, the iPad version has a static multi-day forecast bar along the bottom of the page area, and a static radar display at the top.

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Most of the tools that enable you to remotely control a Mac are vendor-specific: To use them, you need to have matched software components—from Apple or some other single source—at both ends of the remote connection. But there’s another remote-access solution—VNC (Virtual Network Computer)—that’s more flexible.

Because VNC relies on a standard protocol, you can use it to make connections between any of a number of products from different software makers and open-source projects. While these different products might have a variety of different features, they share the core ability to control and view a remote machine.

Also, VNC is available for virtually (sorry) every operating system. In other words, you can use it to connect to or from nearly any computer platform. Mac OS X has built-in support for VNC; its Screen Sharing service is built on, and compatible with, VNC. And some VNC clients can handle Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) connections.

VNC has the added bonus of being available for iOS devices. There are several VNC apps that let you access and control a remote Mac from your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, including iTeleport: Jaadu VNC ( ) and Mocha VNC ( ).

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iPhone and iPod touch users who’ve gotten used to the built-in Weather app on their mobile device may be in for a shock the first time they fire up the iPad. Apple’s latest mobile device arrives without that familiar Weather icon.

But not to worry—a number of developers have stepped up to fill the gap with their own iPad-optimized apps to make checking the weather for unexpected showers or pleasant sunshine almost as easy as glancing out the window. Apart from Weather HD which we profiled earlier this week, here are a few of the apps that have caught our eye since the App Store added iPad-friendly offerings to its inventory.

WeatherBug Elite for iPad

Available from WeatherBug, WeatherBug Elite is free for a limited amount of time. (The iPad-only app will cost $1 after the promotion ends.)

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For some reason unbeknownst to us mere mortals, Apple chose not to include iPad versions of several of its iPhone apps on the device, namely Calculator, Clock, Stocks, and Weather. But third-party developers are already rushing to fill the void, with one of the first contenders being Weather HD from Vimov.

Weather HD goes all-out on the eye candy and includes gorgeous high definition videos of various weather conditions, displaying the appropriate one according to the current weather. Sure, you could just look outside, by why do that when you can see your weather in HD.

The app also has support for multiple cities and can show the current weather conditions, the highs and lows for the day, level of humidity, and the wind speed and direction.

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