Home Weather Center

Home Weather Center (HWC) is a weather graphing, monitoring and analysis application for Mac OS X. HWC is designed as a virtual weather station using Internet based weather sources rather than the more traditional and costly hardware based sensors.

As data is gathered and stored in its database HWC allows you to view weather statistics such as the lowest temperature, or the highest wind speed over any time period stored in the database. In addition HWC contains a journal for weather notes and can generate web pages containing current conditions, graphs, statistics and a web-cam image. HWC can upload these web pages to your server for display via a web browser anywhere in the world.

HWC also monitors the weather and can run a set of pre-defined and user programmed alerts that can trigger emails, send SMS messages to your mobile phone and/or run scripts should an alert trigger.

Features

Home Weather Center offers the following main features:

• Continuous and unlimited recording, monitoring and analysis of weather data for up to three locations.
• Provides graphs of temperature, dew point, wind chill, wind speed, wind direction, precipitation and barometric pressure.
• Can graph and display conditions for any date in the database; dates can be entered using natural language; for example 'last wednesday'. Graph scales range from 1 to 56 days.
• Continuous statistics calculation and display.
• Continuous database timeline maintenance; if HWC misses samples, data is interpolated between last know good sample and the latest.
• Database query facility ­ for example querying the total rainfaill over a given date range.
• A journal, linked to the database for recording your own weather notes.
• Web page generation and upload to web server of current conditions, graphs, web cam image, statistics and journal.
• Export of data from any date range within the database.
• Supplied with four sources of weather data ­ The Weather Underground, The Weather Underground Personal Weather Pages,METAR and NOAA. Backup sources can be specified.
• Plug-in decoder architecture; users can interface HWC to their own weather sources ­ for example hardware based weather stations.
• Three pre-programmed alerts; ice, rain and clear sky.
• Unlimited custom alerts.
• HWC can send email, SMS message (via modem) and run scripts when an alert is triggered.
• In-built test system for custom alerts.
• Independent units for each of the six main data types.
• Speech of any of the three locations.
• Daily data email; sends tab-delimited data email for any or all locations.
• HWC can collect, display and animate satellite imagery.
• Localised in English and French.
• Weather records can be notified via email.

Requirements

Home Weather Center runs on Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

HWC is free for Kairos owners

Customers who purchased Kairos, HWC's smaller sibling, before 1st October 2004 can receive a free upgrade to HWC simply by sending their Kairos registration details to hwc_upgrade@lightsoft.co.uk. More details can be found in the HWC FAQ at: http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/HWC/HWC_faq.html

Forums

As of 1st January 2005 we have a created a forum for HWC discussion. The authors of HWC will pop in to the forums from time to time to answer any questions you may have.

Latest Version

The latest version of HWC is version 1.8.7, released 19th February 2010.
This release is a compatiblity and maintenance update and makes HWC compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 as well as providing updates to various decoders.
If updating from a previous version, please 'look up' your locations from HWC's preferences as some URL's have changed. Also note that we have decided to end support for the weather.com decoder - it will not return any data and will be removed in the next release; please switch to another decoder.

Download

Home Weather Center V1.8.7

Ordering HWC

Orders for HWC are handled either through Kagi via their secure on-line servers or Paypal via the link on the left. Note that you don't need a Paypal account to pay through PayPal.