The Download Blog

Even if you're not one to trust a groundhog's shadow as your weather vane, watching a pet rodent emerge from a hole before hundreds of onlookers is a fascinating North American ritual. The rest of us may not have the prognosticating meteorological savvy of a Punxsutawney Phil, Buckeye Chuck, or Shubenacadie Sam, but on February 2, we can have the next best thing--weather widgets and applications.

Here are some of our favorite ways to read the mercury on our Windows PCs.

Weather Watcher Live
A full, but well-ordered display, detailed forecast, animated map, and severe weather alerts are just a few reasons to download this free, longtime favorite. Hour-by-hour forecasts, wind, rain, and dew point particulars, plus a ticker of weather-related news stories, are a handful more.

(Credit: CNET)

Yahoo Widgets Engine
Small, light on resources, slickly designed, and persistent, Yahoo's attractive, free weather widget gives you a basic reading of current conditions at a glance. Another click brings you a multiday forecast for any city of your choice, and a swelling gallery of user-generated widgets gives you greater weather widget alternatives online.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Google Desktop
What's true for Yahoo Widgets hold for Google's version of its desktop software, which throws a search bar in with its free desktop enhancer. Google supplies its own weather widget, with several user-submitted widgets, such as a weather globe.

(Credit: CNET)

Weather Depot
For U.S. residents, the free version of Weather Depot provides plenty of maps and current temperatures for five saved locations. An hour-by-hour planner and 7-day planner round out the tools. The premium version gives you a 14-day look ahead and detailed conditions for everything ranging from soil temperature to severe weather forecasts.

(Credit: Weather Depot)

(Credit: Google)

Google has put out an official Gmail gadget for its Google Desktop product, giving users the option to run multiple instances of different Gmail accounts as standalone gadgets. The tool includes several useful Gmail features like keyboard shortcuts, mail, and contact search, along with the option to star messages. Users can also compose messages in a little pop-out window, which keeps them from having to fire up their browser.

The app is currently Windows-only and requires Google Desktop version 5 or higher, leaving Mac and Linux users of Google Desktop out in the cold. Anyone looking to use Amnesty's Generator program to convert it for other platforms like OS X's Dashboard are also out of luck, as Google has not offered it as an iGoogle, Web-ready widget.

Simple, small, and free, Google Desktop for Windows, Mac and, Linux indexes your hard drive the way the company's own servers index the Web. Your search results are returned in a Web-page format that's similar to the Google Web site, and the app's sidebar shows regular updates to your favorite programs, from e-mail to your My Pictures folder to RSS feeds and weather.

Although the initial indexing process can take a long time--especially if you have a lot of e-mail, contacts, chat transcripts, and documents for it to parse through--it's well worth the wait to be able to search any of them from a text entry box that lives next to the Quick Launch bar. You'll still find the same basic gadget content: a music player, sports and stock tickers, a file shredder, and even some "wacky" items like an interactive plant. Along with e-mail updates, the weather, and current chats, the Desktop sidebar has a built-in to-do list, notepad, and the ability to integrate other gadgets with ease.

Among the more impressive features are cross-indexing for multiple machines, sharing panel items directly with friends, and a preview window for search results, which saves your index finger from the repetitive motion injury of clicking, opening, and closing until you find what you want.

(Credit: stock.xchng)

Last week, in an article about optimizing hard drives, I mentioned that I'm a digital pack rat. I'm continually bumping up against my disk size and burning files off to DVD.

While maintaining my hard drive is no big problem, finding the files I need among 120GB of images, songs, movies, Web pages, Word docs, and other personal data can be a challenge, especially when I need something ASAP. ... Read more