Portal & CoDither Weather2026×

WINDOWS · MAC OSFINISHED · LAUNCHINGCREATOR AND PRODUCT$4.99 · ONE-TIME

Dither Weather.

A cozy desktop weather pet, dithered from the real forecast.

01 · OVERVIEW

The brief.

PLATFORM

WINDOWS · MAC OS

STATUS

FINISHED · LAUNCHING

ROLE

CREATOR AND PRODUCT

PRICE

$4.99 · ONE-TIME

Dither Weather is a desktop weather companion designed for ambient awareness. It sits in a small window, keeps the forecast glanceable, and translates live conditions into dithered landscape states: clear mornings, rain with wind, blue-ink nights, and severe-weather takeovers. The product goal was to balance emotional presence with real utility. Current conditions, hourly forecasts, and alerts are available when needed, while the default state stays calm enough to live on a desktop all day. The interaction model follows the business model: one-time purchase, no account, no subscription, no ads, and no engagement notifications. The app earns its place by being useful and companionable, not by pulling the user back.

02 · DESKTOP

DITHER WEATHER

IN ONE LINE

A cozy desktop weather pet, dithered from the real forecast.

03 · SCREENS

01 · Dither Weather widget on a sunny day at the beach — the frog companion basking, forecast bands below

Dither Weather widget on a sunny day at the beach — the frog companion basking, forecast bands below

COLOR SCHEME

Color Scheme.

The visual system uses four colors: cream paper, near-black ink, electric blue, and coral for warnings. There are no gradients. Weather, depth, and light are expressed through dot density, so the art direction stays consistent across sun, fog, rain, night, and alerts. The project started under the name "ASCII Weather," but the visual language moved away from characters and toward print-like dithering. Renaming it clarified the product promise: this is not a terminal weather toy, but a small dithered weather object for the desktop.

Paper#F4F2EA

base surface and negative space

Ink#1B1A16

landscape, typography, and weather mass

Blue#1E1EE6

light sources, night accents, and celestial detail

Coral#EB5337

warning states, lightning, and emergency emphasis

Clear night over the city scene in Tokyo — moon, stars, and lit windows drawn in blue ink — FIG. 04 — THE NIGHT SHIFT

THE COMPANION

THE COMPANION.

The companion system gives weather an emotional layer. Users choose a cat, dog, bunny, or frog, and each character reacts to forecast state: umbrellas for rain, fans for hot nights, snowboards for snow, and different idle poses for calm conditions. Severe weather changes the information hierarchy. Routine advisories stay secondary, but high-risk events use scene composition, coral emphasis, and companion expression to make the state harder to miss without adding a modal interruption.

Animation: cat, dog, bunny, and frog companions each reacting to the same sky — FIG. 05 — FOUR TEMPERAMENTS

Review sheet: every weather state — clear, hot, partly cloudy, overcast, fog, drizzle, rain, heavy rain, thunder, storm, tornado, windy, snow, blizzard, cold, night, hot night, cold night — drawn for all four companions — View the companion-state matrix across weather conditions

Tornado warning takeover in Moore, Oklahoma — a dithered funnel fills the scene, the sky closed to ink, the cat wide-eyed, the poem gone literal — FIG. 06 — TORNADO WARNING

THE SCENES

THE SCENES.

Auto scene selection uses climate as the default mapping, not the current condition. The app chooses the kind of place the user lives in, then layers today's weather over it. A tropical coast can receive the beach, while a town above the Arctic Circle can receive tundra.

SC-12

Scene Index

01Rolling Hills
02City
03Small Town
04Beach
05Open Ocean
06Forest
07Mountain Peaks
08Tundra
09Desert
10Prairie
11Village
12Pond with Lotus Blooms

Each backdrop uses the same ink system with condition-specific weather choreography.

Animation: the twelve backdrop scenes cycling in the same four-ink system — FIG. 07 — TWELVE BACKDROPS

Animation: the widget touring seven cities from Singapore to Murmansk, the backdrop re-matching each climate — FIG. 08 — AUTO AT WORK

Snow falling on the tundra scene in Tromsø — cottongrass silhouettes, the dog companion dressed for it — FIG. 09 — ABOVE THE CIRCLE

THE QUIET DETAILS

THE QUIET DETAILS.

A three-line poem sits under the forecast and responds to condition, hour, and season. The content system labels the form clearly: HAIKU for a strict haiku, SENRYU for a wry observation, and VERSE for everything else. no shadow, no time the afternoon just sits so do i The interface supports ten languages, and the poem system supports eleven. Each poem is written for its language instead of being treated as a literal translation pass. Because the localization still needs native-speaker review, settings label the poems as beta and provide feedback tied to the exact poem being viewed. Compact mode handles the desktop constraint. The widget folds into a thin strip with a sliver of scene, temperature, and time, keeping weather present without occupying the workspace. Celsius and Fahrenheit switch from the header without requiring a settings trip.

From the overcast pool — afternoon

no shadow, no time the afternoon just sits so do i