WeatherRibbon
What it does
Every city's own weather. Nothing to look up by hand.
What the ribbon does, in short: a cell per city with its time and its weather, in a ribbon you can shape, size and leave where you like.
The forecasts and the sunrise and sunset times come from MET Norway under CC BY 4.0. The city list is GeoNames', under CC BY 4.0; the weather symbols are the Yr icons from MET Norway, under MIT. All three are credited under Help, then About.
The weather now
Each cell shows its city's temperature and a weather symbol from MET Norway's forecast for the hour. Once a forecast has run out the cell says so rather than show an old value as current.
Today and three days ahead
Today's high, low and rain cover the hours from now to midnight in that city, so late in the day they describe the hours left. Each of the next three days shows its weekday, a symbol, its high and its low.
The hours in detail
A click on a cell opens the next 24 hours for that city: the temperature, symbol, rain and wind each hour, with the city's sunrise and sunset. Close or Escape takes you back to the ribbon.
Each city's own time
Every cell carries its city's local time with its zone's abbreviation (such as BST); where a zone has no letters it shows the offset from UTC instead. The ribbon runs east from Greenwich: London, Berlin, Tokyo, then New York.
Find any city, offline
Search the 34,153 places of GeoNames' list of cities over 15,000 people, built in, so a search never touches the network. What you type matches the start of a word of the name, region or country. A label can be anything up to 32 characters.
Metric or Imperial
Metric is degrees Celsius, millimetres and kilometres an hour; Imperial is degrees Fahrenheit, inches and miles an hour. Every number on the ribbon carries its unit.
Asks no more often than it should
A forecast is asked for again only once MET Norway says it has expired, ten seconds after, so its new forecast is ready; an unchanged one is not sent twice. Requests leave at least a second apart. Refresh now asks at once for every city whose forecast has expired.
Keeps working offline
The last forecasts are kept on disk; with no network the cells show them, saying how old they are once that passes two hours. A failed request is tried again after 10 minutes, waiting twice as long after each further failure, up to two hours.
Your way round
Ten colour schemes from Classic to Neon, Ocean, Ruby and Contrast; 12 hour or 24 hour; horizontal or vertical; light, dark or following the system. Every choice applies at once, with no Save step.
Any size, see-through if you like
Drag the grip in the ribbon's corner to draw the cells from 75 to 200 percent of their size, everything in them together; double-click it to put them back. The Opacity slider in Settings fades the ribbon's background from 20 to 100 percent while the weather stays solid.
Fits, then scrolls
Each cell is as wide as the widest time, weekday, temperature and label its font can draw. The ribbon is as long as its cells until it reaches the edge of the display; past that its cells scroll rather than shrink or wrap.
Stays where you leave it
Drag it by any empty part onto any monitor and it opens there next time. Position centres it flush on an edge of its display, greying an edge that would leave it where it already stands; choosing horizontal sends it to the top edge and vertical to the right.
Shares the screen with its sibling
Run WeatherRibbon beside TimeRibbon and it never lands on it: a ribbon being placed moves along its edge to the nearest free space, else to the opposite edge, while one already in place stays where it is.
Two menus, one list
The icon in the notification area, the menu bar or the system tray and a right-click on the ribbon both offer Add city, Settings, Units, Colour, Orientation, Position, Always on top, Pin ribbon, Refresh now, Help (About, Licence and Check for updates), Hide ribbon and Exit. Untick Pin ribbon and it waits against its edge as a thin tab until the pointer rests on it.
Knows when there is more
When a newer release is out, the ribbon says so and offers the download for your platform; it never installs an update itself. Help's Check for updates asks at any time. Now and then, after a long dry spell, a city may have a question for you.