Dashboard Updater
Miss seeing a working Weather widget in Dashboard on your vintage Mac?
We've reverse-engineered the original widget and connected it to modern WeatherKit and MapKit. All you'll need to do is download our patcher apps below and your old Mac will start pulling real, live weather data.
Love this project?
We're making this free for use, no restrictions or strings attached. All we ask in return is help growing our newly-launched web development agency.
Do you or anyone you know need a top-tier website built, like this one? We'd love consideration/a recommendation. Get in touch with us here: agency@tidelas.com.
How we did this
We used ASP.NET 8 to build a reverse-engineered web service to bring this widget back to life.
We examined the original widget to figure out exactly what data it expected in response from Apple's original web service. This widget is so old it was still parsing XML over insecure HTTP!
Once we understood the XML structure, we were able to start patching in live data from WeatherKit to the old structure.
The Weather widget primarily queries on zipcode, so we used MapKit's server API to reverse-geocode places by name or latitude/longitude. We do a "best effort," results may not account for every edge-case.
We couldn't have done this without proper vintage hardware. Machines we used:
- 12" PowerBook G4 (DVI) - 1.0 GHz, 1.25 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4
- PowerMac G4 Mirrored Drive Doors (2003) - 2x1.25 GHz, 1.0 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.5
- 16" MacBook Pro (M3 Max) - 14x30, 36 GB RAM, MacOS 15.1
