Lively Weather puts a DX12 animated forecast on the Windows desktop

The window is the scene, and it reacts to being moved

Lively Weather is described as a Windows native weather app powered by DirectX 12 animations, and the design goal is stated as desktop first rather than phone first.

The features list is where the project becomes specific. The app is a native UWP app powered by DX12 and Win2D, with fast startup and a small install size, and a Fluent inspired clean design.

The desktop-first commitment shows up in the particles. Snow and other weather particles move with inertia when the window is moved, which is a small effect that a mobile-first design would have no reason to implement, because a phone does not get dragged around a desktop. And there is a subtle weather pause animation when the window goes out of focus, so the scene settles rather than burning GPU cycles on a window nobody is looking at.

Those two behaviours are the clearest statement of intent in the whole project. The goal is not a forecast widget with decoration, it is a small rendered world that behaves like an object on the desk. A static image of falling snow would cost nothing; snow that keeps its momentum when you drag the window across the screen is a physics decision.

The application is distributed through the Microsoft Store, with the download linked from the documentation, and the repository carries a resources/ directory with the hero image, a build/ directory and a src/ directory, which is a small tree for an application of this kind.

The forecast part is conventional, with two details worth knowing

Underneath the animation, the forecast feature is a plain weather panel, and its two distinguishing details are the source switching and the pinning limit.

There is a weekly weather and air quality forecast, so the panel covers both the forecast and the air quality index. You can switch between multiple weather sources, which is a small but real feature: no single provider is reliable everywhere, and the ability to change provider is what stops the app from being useless in a region its default source does not cover.

You can pin a forecast for up to 5 locations, which is a hard limit rather than a soft one.

The release history is where the interesting version information is. Version v2.0.6.0, published on 2026-05-11, is titled New pressure units and time format support. Version v2.0.5.0 from 2024-12-12 is Pixel Shaders and Linux Support. And v1.0.44.0 from 2024-11-09 is Periodic Updates.

That sequence tells you what the maintainer was working on and when. The particle rendering is the old work, the 1.0.x line. The move to 2.0 brought pixel shaders and a Linux port, which is a substantial piece of work for a Windows-first app, since it means the rendering layer had to be moved onto a platform that does not have DirectX 12 at all. The 2.0.6.0 release is a smaller, more ordinary change on top of that.

The repository topic list supports the same reading. Alongside directx, directx12, d2d1, win2d, hlsl and hlsl-shader there are avaloniaui, linux and uwp, which is the combination of graphics APIs and UI frameworks you would expect for a project that renders with DirectX 12 while presenting itself through Avalonia rather than XAML alone.

Screensaver mode is the feature that makes it more than a widget

The white noise and screensaver features are the ones that change what the application is.

The white noise feature offers weather white noise sound effects that dynamically change with the visual, and you can select a custom sound in screensaver mode and use it as a white noise app.

Then there is the Fun section: you can create your own weather in screensaver mode, create depth background effects using AI, and use fullscreen mode.

The screensaver mode is what connects these. A widget pinned to a corner of the desktop and a fullscreen ambient scene are the same application with a different presentation, and the weather is the parameter rather than the content. Making your own weather means choosing the conditions the scene renders, which is a straightforward extension once the renderer already takes weather as an input.

The depth background effect using AI is the most interesting item and the least documented. The phrase is short and there is no further explanation in the repository, so what the AI is doing, whether it generates a depth map or an image, and what runs it, is not stated anywhere in the documentation available here. That is worth knowing before you build on it.

The result is a category that is hard to place. It is a weather app in the sense that it shows the weather, a desktop toy in the sense that it animates, and a screensaver in the sense that it can run fullscreen and loop. The Microsoft Store listing is the distribution point for all three.

Building it is a wiki page away, and the docs are unfinished

There is no build command in the repository documentation. Instead, the Building section points to the project wiki, with the instruction that instructions for building the application can be found there.

The documentation badge is the one that tells you how much to trust it. The Docs badge is marked WIP, in red, which is an honest signal that the wiki is a work in progress rather than a finished guide.

For a project of this kind, that is understandable. There is no command to copy, no environment file to fill in, no package list to install. The build/ directory is in the repository, and the source lives in src/, so the project is laid out as a Visual Studio solution with its build output directory checked in alongside the sources.

The presence of a build/ directory in the root is worth a second look for anyone who wants to modify the app. It suggests the compiled artefacts are part of the repository, which is common for a project that ships binaries through a store listing rather than through a build pipeline, and it means the fastest way to see a change might not be to build at all.

The other signals about the project's shape are in the badges. There is a Crowdin badge pointing at a Crowdin project for lively-weather, which is the standard for a translation workflow, and the topics list includes multiple-language support in the feature set, so the localisation is real and community-contributed. The issues badge points at the GitHub tracker.

The licence is MIT, with a LICENSE file at the root, and the homepage is rocksdanister.com/weather.

Where this sits against the operating system's own weather widget

The comparison that matters is with what Windows already gives you, and it is less lopsided than it looks.

Windows ships a weather widget in the taskbar, and it is fast, native and requires no GPU animation. On a laptop with a mediocre GPU, a taskbar widget will beat a full DX12 particle scene on every measure except how it looks. The taskbar widget is also already there, and a desktop app that shows less information in more space has to justify itself on aesthetics alone.

That justification is real for a lot of people, and the screensaver mode pushes it further. A weather widget is a thing you glance at; a fullscreen ambient scene is a thing you leave running on a second monitor, and the white noise feature turns the same app into an audio environment. That is a different use case from a forecast and it has no built-in equivalent.

Against dedicated weather apps, the position is different again. The serious ones, the ones with hourly charts, severe weather alerts and radar layers, are built for planning. This one has a weekly forecast and air quality, which is a glance-level summary, and the effort clearly went into the rendering rather than into the meteorological depth.

The honest framing is that the weather is the excuse. The application is a DirectX 12 animated desktop toy that happens to display a forecast, with an ambient screensaver mode as the mode where it makes the most sense.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Lively Weather if you want a desktop-first weather widget with real graphics rather than a flat panel, and you are on Windows 11 with a GPU that handles the particle animation. Skip it if you need a phone, a web dashboard or a machine without a DirectX 12 capable GPU, because the animation is the product and the animation is the requirement. Verify first which release you are installing, since the Linux support and pixel shader work landed in 2.0.5.0 while the more recent 2.0.6.0 only added pressure units and time format support, and read the wiki build page before attempting to compile, since the documentation itself is marked as work in progress.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. rocksdanister/weather on GitHub