Weather

Weather

Ctrl+0. Forecasts for the places you keep: your places down the left, one place's weather on the right, and home's weather on the rail — its sky as the tab's picture, the temperature when you hover it.

The reference shows the weather only as a strip across the top of its calendar: three days for one city. That strip is on the Calendar here too, and Weather is also a module of its own, for when three days is not the question.

There is no account and no key. Every copy of Mailbox asks the public services itself, from your own connection: Open-Meteo for the forecasts, the place search and air quality, the US National Weather Service for warnings and the forecasters' discussion, and NOAA's nowCOAST and Environment and Climate Change Canada's GeoMet for the map. Nothing passes through a server of ours — there is none — so the services' free allowances are your connection's own.

The navigation pane

Home	The first place: its weather is the one on the rail. Set as Home moves another to the top.
Your places	Each with its sky and its temperature now. Move Up and Move Down order them; Remove Location drops one, and its cached weather with it.

The page

From the top: the weather now — the temperature, what it feels like, the day's high and low, wind, humidity, UV and sunrise, and the next two hours of rain in a sentence; the Weather Service's warnings where there are any, one card per kind; the next two days hour by hour; the map; the days ahead, each day's range along a temperature scale; air quality; the details — feels like, humidity and dew point, wind, UV, the sun's day, visibility, pressure and where it is going, and the next day's rain; and, in the United States, the forecast discussion: what the local office's forecasters wrote about why.

The five things people look for

Adding a place. Add Location takes a city or a zip code. A US zip code is found at its own spot from a list the application carries — every Phoenix code is not downtown Phoenix — and works offline. Five digits are a postcode in France, Germany and Mexico too, so those are offered as well, with your own country's first.

Units. The ribbon's Celsius button switches temperatures. All five — temperature, wind, rain and snow, pressure and visibility — are in File › Options › Calendar, under Weather. Until you choose, each follows your region: Fahrenheit and miles in the US, the British mix in Britain, metric elsewhere.

The map. One kind of weather at a time — radar, satellite, temperature, wind, precipitation or clouds — with warnings, lightning and pressure (isobars) as overlays you turn on over it. Play runs observations over the last two hours and forecasts over the next two days, in three-hour steps. The legends are drawn in your units. Radar covers North America only; elsewhere satellite, precipitation and clouds show what is coming.

Air quality. Each place is read on its own region's index: the European Air Quality Index in Europe, the US AQI everywhere else, each in its authority's colours, with what the level means and the pollutant behind it.

Keeping it current. On its own: the forecast every half hour, warnings every five minutes, air quality and the discussion every hour — for home always, and for every place while the module is open. Update Now asks for everything at once. A service that fails is tried again after a minute, then two, then four, up to an hour; Work Offline asks for nothing.

How it looks

The page takes its colours from the theme: its cards are light in Dark Gray, as the calendar is, and dark only in Black. The map is drawn by the application from public map data, in the theme's own colours — dark in Black — with the weather laid over it, so it never glares white at night. Rain is blue and heat is warm in every theme: the colour is read before the number.

Where things are

• Units: File › Options › Calendar › Weather, or Celsius on the ribbon.
• The calendar's strip: Options › Calendar › Show a Weather bar on the calendar.
• The cache: ~/.cache/mailbox/weather — the last answer from each service, so a restart shows the weather at once and asks for nothing that is still fresh.
• Credits: the line at the foot of each place's page, as the data's licences ask.
• What is sent: your places' coordinates, and what you type into Add Location — see Hardening.