Living Earth HD provides real-time global cloud cover, live wallpapers and includes screensaver features that turns your desktop into a window into space. The Live Clouds are particularly impressive although they're only updated every 3 hours. It's fascinating watching major weather patterns develop in different parts of the world especially hurricanes and tropical cyclones.

The weather forecasts are useful with 7-day and 2-hour forecasts courtesy of Weather Underground although the accuracy of this varies from place-to-place and it's a shame that you can't customize this to use a feed from your preferred weather provider.

Living Earth HD is an elegant world clock and weather app that looks great on any Mac.

Download Living Earth HD 1.0.3 in Softonic

Imagine a desktop wallpaper that actually 'lives' in real time. That's exactly what the makers of EarthDesk have attempted, creating a live map of the globe that shows real time light and cloud conditions.

EarthDesk features three map views (Political, Natural Color and Living Earth Satellite), 11 projections, and 10,000 cities. You have many options that cover how the Earth is projected onto your desktop, the centering of the map, and how you want it to refresh. Note that EarthDesk does not install itself as a standalone application - it simply loads as a preference pane, from where you can administer it.

When you install the EarthDesk in your preference pane, you're presented with the configuration options. The first thing you need to do is choose a city to center it on in the Locations tab (your hometown location in other words). There are 10,000 to go through but fortunately you can search for them using the search box.

The Display tab is the most interesting as regards setup. In here, you can configure what kind of view you want to use, how far you want to zoom into the Earth and how close you want to see the clouds. Note that you can access the preferences at any time from the menu bar, where you'll see the EarthDesk icon although you'll have to activate this option in the actual preferences itself.

You'll have to experiment for quite a while to find the view that you like. One thing I definitely recommend however is zooming into the planet because it's a bit more interesting than seeing the globe as a whole (at least during the day anyway). The cloud formations you see are the actual clouds in the sky at any given moment and their movements update according to the time schedule you've specified.

All things considered, this isn't particularly interesting. There's a saying "About as interesting as watching paint dry" - and "watching clouds move" could be used in the way. I imagine that EarthDesk is more interesting at night when darkness falls and you start to cities light-up. I also experienced problems stopping and starting Earth Desk - the second time I tried to start it, it simply wouldn't.

EarthDesk is an interesting desktop background for geographers, those keen on keeping an eye on weather movements in real time, or simply those that want a slightly more original desktop background.

Download EarthDesk 6.1.1 in Softonic

The concept is simple. Configure Weather HD with your location and it displays a high resolution image of the conditions in your area. Weather HD supports more than 2 million locations, with 7-day and 3-hourly forecasts. For those in the U.S., Canada and Australia, there's even an animated radar map of weather conditions in addition to the Satellite, Temperature, Humidity stats. In addition, there's detailed information about moon phases including sunrise and sunset and the option to receive severe weather alerts in the U.S. and Europe.

The data for Weather HD is provided by Weather Underground and although it's fairly reliable, this can't be changed to another provider. If you want an instant update of the most recent weather conditions, you can access Weather HD from your Menu Bar. This is sometimes necessary as Weather HD only updates every 3 hours.

Overall, Weather HD is a beautiful desktop weather app that brightens up your desktop whatever the weather.

Download Weather HD 1.6.9 in Softonic

Currently, there are 16 themes although this is continuously increasing. Each theme has a unique layout, clock, text, and weather forecast although the source of the weather can't be changed. If you notice the weather forecast for your area is inaccurate then, there's not much you can do about it. However, some of the scenes are stunning and the layout of the clock and weather looks superb.

Live Wallpaper for Mac features a variety of preferences. You can customize each of the four main parts.

1) Wallpaper. Use default wallpaper of each theme of select your own wallpaper. Some themes have animating wallpapers.
2) Clock. Choose time format. You can hide or show it.
3) Custom text. Change your text. Also, you can hide or show it.
4) Weather forecast. Choose your location. The weather data shows up to 5 days depends on each theme. Also, you can hide or show it.

Live Wallpaper is a slick wallpaper management tool that always ensure your Mac looks good.

Download Live Wallpaper 1.4 in Softonic

There are 16 themes with a unique layout, clock, text, and weather forecast style. Live Wallpaper has a variety of preferences. There are four main customization options: Wallpaper: Use a default wallpaper of each theme or select your own wallpaper. Clock: You can choose the time format and select to hide or display it and Custom text: You can change your text by hiding or show it. Weather forecast: You can choose your location and show up to 5 days in advance. Again, you can choose to hide or show it.

Live Wallpaper is a simple application which livens up your desktop.

Download Live Wallpaper 1.4 in Softonic

Instead of displaying data as a desktop notification, YoWindow features a colorful, fully-animated window that displays a nice landscape and changes according to actual weather conditions.

Besides having a very original interface, YoWindow is also quite informative. It displays the current weather situation (sunny, cloudy, rainy and so on) plus temperature (both real and the one it actually feels like), wind, pressure, and humidity. All these conditions are reflected in an customizable animated background – which you can replace with your own photos as well.

YoWindow includes the weather forecast for the next three days. You can click on each day to access the information right away, or move the timeline on top to check how weather conditions change as hours go by – and also see beautiful sunsets and dawns. The program can be set as your default screensaver as well.

Generally speaking, YoWindow is a surprisingly nice weather forecast tool, though users might miss saving more landscape designs to use as background. Another annoying detail was not to be able to scroll down the list of countries and cities with your mousewheel when choosing a location.

YoWindow is an original, colorful app for checking the weather forecast on your computer.

Download YoWindow 2.0 RC7 in Softonic

Based on Adobe Air, AccuWeather.com Stratus is a neat looking transparent widget that floats on your desktop wherever you drag it. Clicking the calendar button opens a simple five day forecast, which can be toggled between night and day, Fahrenheit and Celsius.

Settings allows you to choose a location, although AccuWeather.com Stratus only allows you to have one at a time. A saved list of locations would be nice. You can also choose between white and black text, depending on what's easier to read over your background.

AccuWeather.com Stratus is a simple but effective weather widget for your desktop.

Download AccuWeather.com Stratus 1.1 in Softonic

Weather Vane works for both US and international locations and will activate instantly as soon as you login to your machine. The current temperature and conditions are displayed in the drop down menu along with a 4 day forecast. You can customize the weather retrieval period between from every 15 minutes to every 6 hours. You can also manually refresh the weather at any time by clicking on the temperature gauge in the Menu Bar.

I really like the fact that you can see the forecast for the next 4 days instantly without having to visit other websites with Weather Vane. The only annoying thing is that, like many Menu Bar items, you have to manually go into the preferences and add it to the login items so it starts when your system does - it would be better if this was selected by default.

If you want the weather delivered to your desktop in a no fuss free application, then Weather Vane is an excellent choice.

Download Weather Vane 2.3.2 in Softonic

Instantly find your e-mail, files, media, Web history, and chats. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts your information easily within your reach. It frees you from having to manually organize your files, email, and any web pages you have viewed, giving you more time to do what you want.

You can:

• Get all your personalized info in one place with Sidebar
• Launch applications and search instantly with Quick Find
• Find all your email, files, photos, web history, Gmail, and more
• Search conveniently in Outlook with the Outlook Toolbar
• Developers can write plug-ins for the sidebar

Google Gadgets

Want a clock on your computer desktop? How about a calendar, a WiFi indicator, a TV, or anything else you can dream up? Say hello to Google Gadgets. These interactive mini-applications can be anything from games to search tools to media players, and they can be any shape and size – use a weather globe to show you the latest forecast. We’ve got a lot of ready-made gadgets you can add to your desktop, but they’re also so easy to create that you can probably figure out how to build your own.

You can also save your gadget content and settings online to protect your info from computer crashes and be able to access it from your other computers by logging into your Google Account with Google Desktop. For instance, you can now ‘synch’ the To Do list on both your laptop and your desktop.

Richer Google integration

Google Desktop is more fully with the rest of Google. For instance, you can now add some Google Gadgets from your personalized homepage into your Sidebar, or anywhere else on your desktop You can also view upcoming birthdays with the Orkut gadget, see what’s popular on Google Videos, or access your Google Calendar from your desktop.

Personalize your desktop

Google Desktop will recommend new gadgets and can also automatically create a personalized Google homepage for you based on the subjects you’re most interested in. For instance, if you’re constantly doing searches on new movies, Google Desktop can automatically recommend a movies gadget to add to your desktop.

Download Google Desktop 1.7.0.1877 in Softonic

The term ‘widget’ has traditionally been used to describe some kind of contraption or piece of technology that improves the overall functionality of a particular product. Mac OSX and Microsoft Vista users will be all too aware of how software widgets can bring more power to your desktop, as they now come as standard on these operating systems. For the benefit of the uninitiated, a widget is basically a small application that provides you with easy access to a particular function. These applications are docked on a ‘dashboard’, and you can add as many widgets as you like, giving you instant access to anything from a simple clock to a weather forecasting tool.

Yahoo! was one of the early pioneers of widgets, and this application is likely to intrigue anyone who hasn’t come across the technology before. The package sits on your desktop and allows you to download and install widgets from the Yahoo! site. There’s a healthy range of widgets available here (almost 4,000), each of which are installed automatically as soon as they’re downloaded. Although this helps to keep things simple, it’s frustrating that you cannot change the destination folderwhich folder the widgets are stored in here.

While it all runs from the same package, each widget is actually its own application. In previous releases of the Widget Engine, this had a tendency to tie up your system resources when using multiple widgets. However, tThis issue has been better addressed in this version, and it seems much less memory-intensive than before. Having said this, it’s not a good idea to keep more than about 10 running at once, as you do start to notice it then.

In terms of the widgets themselves, it would obviously be impractical (and quite frankly, boring) for us to review all 4,000 here, but needless to say there are some very useful ones, along with some downright pointless ones. For instance, we can’t really see the benefit of having a dancing skeleton on your desktop , yet there are tools for checking stock quotes, accessing iTunes, organizing your Flickr images, checking your WiFi signal and getting the latest travel news, all directly from your desktop. Graphically, the widgets are very impressive and each of them floats over the screen without the constraints of traditional window borders, ensuring they don’t intrude on your other activities.

We like the fact that you don’t need to register a Yahoo! account in order to use widgets but Yahoo! still doesn’t allow Desktop Widgets to be included on My Yahoo! pages, overlooking something both Microsoft and Google already allow. Although the program doesn’t really add anything you won’t find in Mac's Dashboard, it’s perfect for Mac users looking for a bit of diversity.

Download Yahoo! Widgets 4.5.2 in Softonic

There are plenty of desktop wallpaper editors out there but few that actually allow you to create collages and spreads of your own photos.

My Better Desktop is designed to do exactly this by allowing you to not only to make collages of your own photos on your desktop, but also turn your desktop into an information center with data such as satellite weather, traffic updates and webcams.

When you download the app, you're actually getting two packages in one. My Better Desktop is the main application and works as a layout designer. With this, you can organize your desktop as you want it, before applying the changes for real. Simply drag-and-drop photos onto the desktop wallpaper until you're happy with it.

The second app is Desktop Background which you have to run quietly in the background for the design you've made to take effect. It's a bit annoying that you need this to run My Better Desktop but the sophistication of the program means that it can't integrate simply with your default wallpaper manager. It does offer some useful tools though such as the possibility to adjust background positions or pause and resume the display. It is however very lightweight and doesn't affect the running of the rest of your system.

My Better Desktop is a great way to freshen up your desktop or add more than just photos to it. The setup process is a bit long winded but it's worth the hassle.

Download My Better Desktop 1.0.16 in Softonic

WeatherDock is an excellent desktop companion to follow the weather.

The application picks up the feeds from weather.com, which is widely considered as one of the best sources on the internet. You'll not only get 10 day forecasts and 2 day part info but also precise information such as real and feels like temperature, sky conditions, pressure, wind speed, humidity and UV. One little info it lacks though is predicted accumulation.

What I really like about WeatherDock though is the multiple display options. It can appear as a program window, a dock icon, a desktop icon or even a menu bar. The icons look really snazzy and are ideal to get a quick glance of the weather in your area. The menu bar is more discreet, but if you really want to dig into the details the best is to open up the program window.

If there was one drawback it's that WeatherDock only works with weather.com. It'd be great to be able to choose the weather feeds, as regional weather sites sometimes give out more precise information. On the whole though, weather.com is an excellent source, with detailed weather data.

WeatherDock is an excellent weather notifier for Mac with four different display modes, which shows advanced conditions from weather.com.

Download WeatherDock 2.5 in Softonic

Your digital life has a lot of statistics: incoming mail, appointments, disk space. Stattoo "tattoos" stats right on your desktop picture: out of the way, but always handy!

Stattoo includes the following capsules:

Clock

Weather

Disk Usage

Playing Song

iCal

Mail

. check Stattoo first

Battery

Date

RSS or Atom Feed

Download Stattoo 1.5 in Softonic

DashSaver is a screensaver that resides in the “Desktop & Screen Saver” preference pane. When DashSaver is selected as a User’s screensaver, when the computer is inactive after the specified time as set in the Screen Saver preference pane, the dashboard is displayed and the users’ desktop is hidden. Find you are under utilizing one of the best new features in Mac OS X Tiger?

It’s not alway convenient to bring up the Dashboard just to see the weather or some RSS feeds. However, imagine your computer showing you information after you leave and come back to your computer? As you sit back down you can quickly glance over a wealth of information and tools before getting back to work. Give DashSaver a try. It makes the dashboard useful in a whole new way!

Download DashSaver 1.2 in Softonic

See the world on your desktop with realtime cloud maps, recent earthquakes, current tropical storms, and your local weather forecast.

Features:

• Plots all recent 5.0 magnitude and greater earthquakes
• Plots tropical storms, their paths and projected paths color coded by storm strength
• Plot any world city
• Displays your local (United States) 4-day weather forecast for day and night time
• Display the position of the sun and moon, showing the moon in its current phase
• Universal application for best performance on PowerPC and Intel Macs

Download WorldViewer 1.0 in Softonic