Dark Sky Alfred Extension
Before New York City went dark last week because of Hurricane Sandy, I was hunkered down prepared for the worst. Dark Sky was open on my phone constantly to see how the weather would be unfolding for me. The combination of the impending storm and being on lock down had me curious of ways to keep busy while I was stuck inside.
That’s when I started playing with the Dark Sky API.
Often on grey days, as I go out for lunch I’ll check Dark Sky to see whether I’ll need a rain coat or not. I wanted the great information from Dark Sky in an easy to check way on my Mac. Alfred is perfect for that.
This extension checks Dark Sky for the weather with the command
now, providing you with the current temperature,
conditions, and what to expect for the next hour. Using the command
today or tomorrow will give you the outlook
for the next 24 hours.
Since I think that it’s important for computers to communicate with us in human ways, I spent a lot of time molding the information that the API returns into full grammatical sentences. 1
This is what the weather looks like now as a good ole Nor’easter is rolling in:
It’s 40 degrees and possible light sleet. Expect sleet in 2 minutes.
To configure the extension for your area, look up the coordinates
for your address and enter them as LAT and LON
in the extension settings.
Alfred displays the weather using Notification Center. If out of the
box, it’s not showing you anything when you submit the command, check
that your Alfred settings have Extension Output
selected.
Update [2013-03-23]: I’ve updated this for basic Alfred 2.0 functionality. I hope to update again sometime soon to integrate new workflow features.
Download the Dark Sky Alfred Extension or see it on Github
Please let me know if you see anything wrong with the wording of how the forecast is returned.↩︎