The all-in-one tray-information application for weather and time enthusiastic

In this review I’m going to introduce Weather Alarm Clock which is a fully skinnable clock-replacement for Windows XP that can even show the current weather conditions and temperature on the system tray, as well as opened in a small window it can reveal many other interesting weather-related datas, and 5-day forcast for all over the world.

Fisrt of all, let’s have a look at my system tray, before Weather Alarm Clock was installed on my system.

Boring, isn’t it? Now let’s see how Weather Alalrm Clock spiced up it.

Getting interested? Well then, read on.

When I found Weather Alarm Clock I was looking for a software that could inform me from the current temperature and weather conditions in Budapest, Hungary in two small icons. Thanks God, I’ve tried out many of them, but lots of them worked only with US zip-codes, and the others, well, I couldn’t bear their minimalistic design conceptions. And then, from heaven above… I found the website of Weather Alarm Clock, browsed around among the screenshots, and I knew it right away: this was the one I’we been looking for.

2. Date, Time and Weather

To introduce the functions of Weather Alarm Clock I guess it’s the best to have a look at the right-click menu and the Main Dialog window, as you can reach every feature with them. So let’s start our journey.

The Main dialog will be discussed later on. The Replace Windows Clock function speakes for itself, if you do not have it checked, then Weather Alarm Clock looks like this:

In the Options submenu you can choose wether to display the date, the day of the week and the second, and yo can decide to use 24 or AM/PM hour format. The transparent background option makes Weather Alarm Clock looks like mine, if you uncheck it this will be the result:

(Note that this is how it looks like in my preferred skin only, and it can appear in any background colors you like, even in gradinent fill between two custom colors, read more at the Skins)

3. Windows Uptime

Now, let’s move on and have a look at other menupoints.

The Mode submenu can be used to switch between Time an UpTime (how long your computer is running) modes, or even just flash UpTime for 5 secs.

If you set it into UpTime mode, that’s what you get. Very useful, if you leave your machine alone, and you wants to be assured when you get back, that the machine ran fluently, there were no restarts at all.

Alarm, Weather, Atomic clock only pops up the appropriate tabs of the Main Dialog, so they will be discussed later. Random skin speaks for iself again. The Date/Time Properties pops up the well known Windows’ Date and Time Properties dialog, that you could acces by double clicking on the clock before Weather Alarm Clock was installed on your system.

4. Calendar with Skin support

The Calendar pops up a skinnable calendar, with a bulit in pop-up menu, where you can select your preferred skin color, and choose the start of the week. You can easily navigate through the months of the year, and can get back to today with the very useful Goto Today feature. Bravo again.

5. Date and Time properties

And now comes just the big deal. The Main Dialog, where you can adjust your settings, and get access to many important features.  Let’s start with the Date/Time tab.

This is the tab, where you can control how the top part of Weather Alarm Clock’s tray area will look like.

Most of the settings are obvious, and it is very respectable that you can even choose, what the Weather Alarm Clock sholud do, if you doubleclick on it on the system tray. You can also set Weather Alarm Clock to run on startup, which, beides is the deafult, i storngly advise you to do.

6. Alarm Clocks

On the Alarms tab, you can manage your alarms. You can set an alarm to a specified date and time, or as you can see it in this picture it can be set regulary, as the chimes preset is made.

7. Alarm Clock sounds and actions

As shown on the other two pictues, you can choose a custom sound to play, yo can set how many times to play it, or you can choose to let the machine alarm, until you close the alarm window. With the Action tab, you can specify an action to perform, when the alarm gets active, so to put in an other way, you can schedule program-startings or document- openings to a given date and time. Very useful function again.

8. Windows Clock Skins

The next tab is the Skins, where yo can choose from many, I said many, skins so everybody should find one that matches his/her taste and desktop theme. The one I use is the Black-white 3D as you can see it on this picture. And for those, who aren’t satisfied with these skins… Well get registered, and you can download more skins (check the bottom of the window)

Skins shown at the Weather Alarm Clock’s website

9. Tray Clock Gradient

If you want to use the Gradient function, you have to uncheck the Transparent background checkbox, to see the results. Now you can pick two custom colors, and see what happens. Using the gradient function can result Weather Alarm Clocks like these:

Horizontal gradient

Vertical gradient

On our journey around Weather Alarm Clock has come to the most interesting point, the Weather tab which controls the bottom of Weather Alarm Clock’s tray area, and which consits of 3 subdialogs that can be swithed by pressing the buttons placed on the left side.

The Current dialog tells you everything, I said everything, you ever wanted to know about the current weather conditions, like… But let this picture speak instead of me.

11. 5 Day Forecast

If you click on the Daily button yo can get a 5 day forcast, or if your Weather Alarm Clock is not yet registered a 2 day one. For unregistered users… Well, I guess,  it’s better to have it with these restrictions, than to have nothing at all…

On the left side of each day yo can see the the lowest temperature of the day, and on the right side the highest temperature of the day, that are predicted.

12. Weather Settings

The Settings dialog is where you can adjust all your settings about the weather modul.

Weather Alarm Clock uses The Weather Channel’s forcast service, so if you can find your hometown here then you can be sure, that Weather Alarm Clock will work with it. I, personally just entered my hometown, and country, and clicked to Get Weather, and less than an eyeblink it displayed, that Budapest was found. On the other hand, you do not have to worry that the program you perhaps intedned to buy will stop funtioning after a while, as it is based on weather.com which won’t be disappering soon, as far as I guess…

Three very important things to mention. This is the place, where yo can choose wether to display the temperature in F˚ (English units)  or C˚ (Metric untis). Here you also can specifiy here the intervall, how often Weather Alarm Clock should update weather information. And at last, the rolldown list covers it, however under the Get Weather section there is a Proxy buton, where ju can set your proxy settings if needed.

13. Additional Time Zone

Moving on to Time Zones, first let’s have a a look at this picture, as s picture can tell more than a thousand words.

What you can adjust here is the center of the Weather Alarm Clock tray area, the world time diplay. By default it is turned of, but it can be very convenient when you’re far away from home, and want to know wether or not a phonecall would wake your girlfiend/wife/boyfriend/husband/etc. on, or if you’re a business man in Europe and you deal with ie. Japan enginers, Weather Alarm Clock’s world time clock is a very useful feature to have. You just have to select the timezone, and it’s ready. If you want to change the title of the wolrd time clock’s display, you can easily manage it through the Prefix textbox, and the result will be something like this.

14. Atomic Clock Sync

And now, approaching to the end of our tour, let’s have a look at our last stop, the Atomic Clock tab, where you can specify, how often and to which timeserver (atomic time provider server) Weather Alarm Clock shold syncronize the computer’s clock. You can set it tomanual mode, or daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, and you can select one of the presets, or you can even add a timeserver yourself.

Well, that’s all I could tell you about this program. And the final assessment? I guess you can figure it out… 5/5, no doubt. Be careful! Once you install it on your system you will fall in love with it to. I warned you!

15. Conclusion

C Pros:

• Time & date/uptime, worldtime, temperature, weather condition… It’s all there on the tray. Lovely!


• Easy to setup via Main Dialog.


• Reliable: based on weather.com


• Useful and easy to use features.


•  Nice design, skinnable calendar and tray area.

D Cons:

• Not a freeware, after 30 days it stops fuctioning.


• You can get only 2 day forecasts as an unregistered user.