Weatherbug for Mac OS X

Alas, poor Weatherbug, the controversial weather monitoring application for Windows is now available for Mac OS X. For years, many have fingered Weatherbug as spyware, others have simply called it adware. I'm not going to spend my time arguing its definition and instead fall back on my own personal definition of a bad application: if an application behaves in a way contrary to its clearly defined purpose or if it otherwise modifies the standard, expected behavior of the operating system or installed softwares, then it's a bad application. Call it spyware, call it adware, call it malware, call it whatever you want, just keep it the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks off my system.

Fortunately, the programmers of Weatherbug for Mac OS X have not appeared to include any type of ad-serving, redirecting, or pop-up-serving components. I've installed it on my system and after a few hours of browsing, it has not attempted to contact any service other than the weather-synching service operated by the company. No ads, no spyware, no behind-the-scenes shenanigans. This is how Weatherbug for Windows should've be written; perhaps this is a sign that the company is listening to how annoyed some tech support staff are at their misbehaving application.

If you still don't trust Weatherbug but desire a weather-monitoring application for Mac OS X, you're in luck. There almost a dozen available, and most of them free, including: Meteorologist, Weatherpop, WeatherMenu, Seasonality, and WeatherDock.

Oh, one last thing. I had to chuckle at the differences between uninstalling Weatherbug for Mac OS X and uninstalling Weatherbug for Windows.