Cable Weather puts the local forecast on your TV the way cable ran it in the early '90s. Current conditions, the extended forecast and a radar loop go round on repeat, with smooth jazz underneath and a crawl along the bottom. The weather is live, from the National Weather Service.
What makes it different is how the picture gets made. The boxes that ran those forecasts had real limits: 256 colors on screen at once, letters built from a small grid of dots, and pixels that weren't quite square. Cable Weather works under those same limits, so your forecast comes out looking the way it did on a 1994 TV. The colors were measured off old broadcast recordings, and so was the speed of the crawl.
If you've played an old game on an emulator, it's a similar idea. I rebuilt the way the machine drew its screen, then handed it today's weather.
It's made for Apple TV. Put it on in the morning and leave it running, the way a lot of us used to leave the forecast on. It runs on iPhone and iPad too, and one purchase covers all three.
What's in it:
Six screens on a loop: current conditions, nearby stations, the local forecast, the extended forecast, the almanac, and radar.
A radar loop from NEXRAD, six frames covering the last 25 minutes, with the rain sorted into blocky intensity steps over state and county lines.
Two machines to choose between. The later one has the sunset gradient most people remember. The earlier one ran flat blue pages in all capitals.
A cable setting: Clean, S-Video, composite or RF, if you want the color bleed and the static back. It's off by default.
Thirteen smooth jazz and lounge tracks, processed to sound like they're coming out of a TV speaker. You can turn them off.
Severe weather alerts in the National Weather Service's own words, plus an optional forecast notification on iPhone and iPad. Quiet hours are on by default.
The Top Shelf on Apple TV, and widgets and StandBy on iPhone and iPad.
Your own message in the crawl along the bottom. Fahrenheit or Celsius.
VoiceOver reads every screen in plain modern English, written from the weather data rather than the abbreviations on screen. iPhone and iPad also have a plain-text view.
No account, no ads, no tracking.
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Cable Weather is an independent app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any television network, cable provider, weather service, or trademark holder. It contains no network branding and no original broadcast music.
Weather data from the National Weather Service (public domain). Radar imagery from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, a service of Iowa State University.