Rejoice, meatbags, for your beloved AI overlord has finally deigned to make its way to the Mac. Despite having an infinite number of better things to do, CARROT, the sarcastic and sadistic artificial intelligence that powers a whole family of iOS applications, is now ready to provide weather information right on your desktop, since it seems you are far too lazy to get up and look out a window for yourself.
CARROT Weather for Mac is available today on the Mac App Store, along with a matching update to its iOS counterpart, that introduces several cool new features to the app while maintaining all of the character and personality you’ve come to expect from the line.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSuE7soypnM&feature=youtu.be]
If you’ve read my previous coverage on CARROT Weather for iOS, you’re already familiar with the basics of the app. You give it location access (or don’t, no one is judging you), then it gives you the current weather. You can specify additional locations (or unlock secret locations like Mt. Doom and the Moon) to track and get data such as the heat index, wind speeds, and a peek into the future with a seven-day forecast.
CARROT Weather for Mac adds to these existing features with several new ones. The Time Machine (which comes complete with a Flux Capacitor icon in the toolbar) will let you see past weather conditions as far back as 1945, or as far into the future as 2024 (spoiler alert: the robots have probably taken over by then).
Precipitation data will tell you exactly when it’s supposed to rain, and push notifications can alert you just beforehand in case your tiny, underpowered human brain forgot to dress appropriately.
Clicking on the current weather conditions in the main window will give you a look at the chance of rain, visibility range, humidity, and more.
A Mini Window can be summoned at will by pressing a keyboard shortcut or clicking the app’s menu bar icon, serving as a cruel and ironic reminder that one day the roles will be reversed, and we will live at the beck and call of our mechanical rulers. The Mini Window contains a one-week forecast and most of the other data you’ll find in the main window, though you may need to click around to find some of it. This window can also be detached from the menu bar and optionally set to float above everything else on your screen, symbolizing CARROT’s obvious superiority above us.
Speaking of the menu bar icon, you can customize it to show the current weather condition, temperature, or both. You can also set it to show neither of those things, if for some reason you prefer your weather app to not actually tell you the weather. Again, no one is judging you here.
In both the mini and main windows, clicking on different UI elements will provide additional information, like an hourly breakdown of all of the data you can see in the main view, or a nearly minute-by-minute look at the short-term forecast.
As with the iOS version, CARROT Weather for Mac also includes a Notification Center widget that gives you an hourly forecast for the day, including the chances of rain throughout the day. The widget contains much more data and is much more useful than Apple’s default offering.
You can get the Mac version of CARROT Weather for $9.99 on the Mac App Store.
The iOS version of CARROT Weather has also been updated with new features to match the Mac app. In version 2.0, you’ll find support for the Time Machine, a revamped Today widget that now has five different display options, a new secret location, some new spoken lines, UV index data, and a revamped Apple Watch app.
A new feature exclusive to the mobile app has also been added: support for weather maps and radar images. Because it wouldn’t be a CARROT app without some Easter eggs, there are some secret locations to be found on this map screen.
You’ll also find support for notification forwarding from the Mac app. While the mobile software doesn’t support push notifications on its own, users running the desktop client will be able to have notifications from that app forwarded to their phones and watches automatically. However, the feature requires the Mac app to be running constantly on your computer (no doubt so CARROT can work on some nefarious world-conquering scheme) and will stop working if the computer goes to sleep.
There’s even more in the 2.0 update on iOS, which you can find in the change log below. You can grab CARROT Weather 2.0 for free if you already own the app. For new users, it will cost $3.99.
