// A DESKTOP WEATHER WIDGET_

A cozy desktop weather pet, dithered from the real forecast.

Real global weather, rendered as a moving dithered scene that shifts with the sky. A companion reacts to the elements, and a short poem marks the day. It’s the weather, made cozy.

How to get it → $4.99 once · no subscription

Windows 10/11 macOS universal No ads · no account

The Dither Weather window showing a dithered beach scene in clear weather, with a frog companion and the current temperature.

The window itself — frameless, draggable, resizable. Shown at its design size.

What it is

Living dithered art

Twelve hand-built scenes rendered with a Bayer 4×4 ordered dither and animated in real time — not a static icon set. The scene follows your sky: time of day, cloud cover, precipitation.

A reactive companion

Pick one of eight pets. Yours suns itself in clear skies, pops an umbrella in the rain, and straps on a snowboard when it freezes — twenty distinct weather states each.

Uncompromising accuracy

Current conditions, feels-like, wind, UV and a 7-day outlook from Apple Weather, with a MET Norway fallback. Severe alerts take over the scene when it matters.

Twelve scenes, one forecast

Beach, tundra, desert, peaks, pond, city and more — each a living dithered scene, not an icon. Every one animates with your real conditions: rain falls through it, snow drifts across it, fog closes it in, and the whole thing shifts from day to night with your sky.

⌖ AUTO — Singapore gets a lily pond, Reykjavík gets alpine peaks, Cairo gets dunes. The scene is picked from your location’s climate and terrain, or you can set one yourself in Settings.

Eight companions that react

Choose one in Settings and it stays with you across every city and every sky. Each has twenty weather states — 160 hand-tuned poses in all, drawn procedurally rather than from sprite sheets.

boba catmanjū dog dango bunnymochi frog taiyaki octopusdorayaki bear melonpan tanukimonaka panda

A grid of all eight companions — cat, dog, bunny, frog, octopus, bear, tanuki and panda — each shown in eight weather states: clear, hot, rain, thunder, fog, snow, cold and night.

Every companion, in eight of its twenty states. Rendered straight from the app’s character engine.

Taiyaki octopus companion in an open-ocean scene under clear skies.

taiyaki octopus · ocean, clear

Dorayaki bear companion in a forest scene under partly cloudy skies.

dorayaki bear · forest, partly cloudy

Melonpan tanuki companion in a village scene under partly cloudy skies.

melonpan tanuki · village, partly cloudy

Monaka panda companion in a hills scene under partly cloudy skies.

monaka panda · hills, partly cloudy

A poem for the weather

Every forecast brings a short poem from a library of hundreds, authored natively in eleven languages — never machine-translated. The Japanese poems are true haiku (5-7-5 mora) with a monthly 季語 seasonal word; the Chinese follow the 汉信 hanpai form.

A note on translation: the interface (10 languages) and the poems (11 languages) are in beta while we gather native-speaker feedback. Spot a clumsy phrase? Settings → Send Feedback goes straight to the developer.

The Dither Weather interface in Japanese, showing a haiku beneath the forecast.

日本語 — no uppercasing, system CJK face

The Dither Weather interface showing an Arabic poem laid out right to left.

العربية — the poem flips right-to-left, independent of the interface language

The Dither Weather interface fully translated into Irish.

Gaeilge — full interface translation

The Dither Weather interface fully translated into Filipino.

Filipino — full interface translation

Made to live on your desktop

Frameless, draggable and fully resizable to fit your space. Pin the living scene for a constant view, or collapse it to a slim bar when you just want the numbers.

°C / °F Adjustable dither grain City, zip or coordinates 10-language interface Three window modes

The forecast panel open, showing an hourly strip and a 7-day outlook.

Hourly and 7-day, always one click away

Compact bar mode: a single horizontal strip showing the temperature and conditions.

Compact bar — the numbers, no scene

Mini bar mode: an even smaller strip showing just the temperature.

Mini bar — smaller still, for when the desktop is busy

A tornado warning taking over the entire widget, replacing the scene with a high-contrast alert.

A tornado warning takes over the whole scene

Real weather, real sources

Current conditions, feels-like, wind, UV and a full 7-day outlook from Apple Weather, with a MET Norway fallback that takes over within a second if Apple is unreachable. Local severe-weather alerts slide in as a banner; critical warnings take the whole scene.

Apple Weather MET Norway · CC BY 4.0 US NWS alerts © OpenStreetMap

Privacy first: your location goes to those providers to fetch the forecast and nowhere else. No account, no ads, no analytics, no trackers. Ever.

$4.99

once. not a subscription.

No adsNo account No trackingFree updates

Windows

10 / 11, 64-bit · signed installer
2.8 MB download

macOS

Universal — Apple Silicon & Intel
Signed & notarized · 8.0 MB download

Questions

Is this a subscription?

No. $4.99, once. No account, no monthly fee, no ads. Updates are free.

When can I buy it?

Both builds are finished, signed and notarized. They’re going through store submission now — the Microsoft Store for Windows and the Mac App Store for macOS. There’s no mailing list — but the address above reaches me directly, and I’ll tell you the day it’s live if you ask.

What platforms does it run on?

Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), and macOS as a universal build for both Apple Silicon and Intel.

Does it need an internet connection?

Yes, to fetch your live forecast from Apple Weather (with a MET Norway fallback). Nothing else in the app needs one — the scenes, companions, poems and fonts are all local.

Why “dither” and not “ASCII”?

The app used to be called ASCII Weather, but the artwork is a real Bayer 4×4 ordered dither — there’s no character art in it at all. Renamed for accuracy.

Are the ten interface languages reviewed by native speakers?

Not yet. They’re written directly in each language rather than machine-translated, but they’re labelled beta in-app until a native speaker has checked them. Feedback from Settings goes straight to the developer.

What happens to my location?

It’s sent only to the weather and geocoding providers, to return your forecast. No personal data is collected, no account exists, nothing is sold. No analytics, no tracking.