Themes
Ten themes, seven generations of hardware
A theme sets the visual skin, the typography, the background art, the music pool, the scene order and the default narrator. Change it in Settings → Theme.
They are not equally finished
Some are complete reconstructions. Others are correct in palette and typography while their distinctive page layouts are still being built. Each card below says which, because discovering it yourself after choosing a theme is a worse experience than being told.
Whatever the visual status, the narration is complete for every theme. A half-built layout still announces everything it holds, so a theme in progress is never a theme that tells you less.
The themes
-
WeatherStar 3000
1988–1990
Blocky coloured text on a dark blue and purple field. No weather icons, and no radar at all: the unit could not render it.
- Narrator
- Silent — the 3000 had no local voice
- Status
- Palette and typography correct; the text-page renderer is still to come.
-
WeatherStar Jr
1993–2014
The 3000’s layouts in the 4000’s cleaner typeface. Text-only pages, no on-unit radar, no cartoon icons.
- Narrator
- Allan Jackson (unverified)
- Status
- Awaiting the same renderer stack as the 3000.
-
WeatherStar 4000 v1
2001–2004
The iconic one. Flat orange header with a dark-blue diagonal cut, solid blue content pane with a cyan inner border, yellow titles, gold temperatures, and the 1998 cartoon icon set.
- Narrator
- Allan Jackson
- Status
- The most complete of the WeatherStar themes.
-
WeatherStar 4000 v2
2005–2009
Late-era redesign on the same hardware, and the app’s default. A skewed orange parallelogram header, a floating cyan-glow content box, and an orange-to-purple gradient behind it — the look this website borrows.
- Narrator
- Allan Jackson
- Status
- The always-on footer bar is still outstanding.
-
WeatherStar XL
1998–2014
Deep navy with gold Akzidenz lettering over a blue-sky cumulus wallpaper, a 7-Day Outlook, and a persistent LDL crawl.
- Narrator
- Allan Jackson
- Status
- The most complete theme overall.
-
Weatherscan Local
1999–2003
Regional photographic backgrounds — neighbourhood, forest, ocean, mountain, southwest — framed by upper and lower text strips, over Trammell Starks’ Music for Local Forecast.
- Narrator
- Allan Jackson
- Status
- No skylines and no yellow wedges; those came later.
-
Weatherscan V1
2003–2005
City skylines with the “weatherscan” wordmark, and colour-coded arc curves per segment: yellow for local forecast, orange traffic, blue travel, green garden, teal health, purple ski. The 15-track in-house jazz catalogue.
- Narrator
- Amy Bargeron
- Status
- First era on the IntelliStar platform.
-
Weatherscan V2 L-bar
2005–2022
The final redesign, and the one most people remember from the shutdown. Interstate in the chrome, the same skylines, and the 33-track remastered stereo catalogue.
- Narrator
- Amy Bargeron
- Status
- The defining L-bar layout is not built yet — V2 currently renders in the standard frame, distinguished from V1 by typography and palette.
-
IntelliStar 1
2003–2013
Black-to-navy gradient with muted gold accents, Interstate typography, and 254 city-gradient backgrounds rotating between scenes.
- Narrator
- Jim Cantore
- Status
- Icons and typography correct; several pre-2007 page layouts are still generic.
-
IntelliStar 2 / 2 Jr HD
2011–2022
The modern HD look: bright blue, glass panels, Interstate chrome with Helvetica Neue LDL body text, and 282 HD background plates. Severe weather draws its own dedicated background set.
- Narrator
- Chandler
- Status
- The LOT8s windowed frame is still outstanding.
The narrators
Narrators are libraries of recorded voice clips, stitched into sentences at runtime — the same trick the real hardware used. They are the actual broadcast voices, played back, not synthesized.
- Allan Jackson
- Thousands of clips and by far the deepest library. The definitive local-forecast voice, and the default for the WeatherStar and Weatherscan Local eras.
- Jim Cantore
- The IntelliStar 1 era, including warning headlines and snow accumulation phrasing.
- Amy Bargeron
- The voice of Weatherscan; scene intros for V1 and V2.
- Chandler
- IntelliStar 2 era intros.
- Silent
- No clip narration at all — era-correct for the WeatherStar 3000, which had no local voice. Your screen reader still announces everything, so you lose nothing but the recorded voice.
You can override the narrator for any theme in Settings → Audio → Voice narrator.
Clip confidence
The clip libraries were reconstructed from fan archives, and not every filename's meaning is certain. Each clip carries a rating — confirmed, likely, or guess — and the “Clip confidence threshold” setting decides how adventurous the matching gets. Anything without a suitable clip is simply carried by your screen reader instead, so a stricter setting means less recorded voice, never less information.
High contrast, on top of any of them
High contrast is an overlay, not an eleventh theme. Turn it on in Settings → Theme and it layers over whichever era you are in, neutralising photographic backgrounds so text is not fighting a picture for legibility.
The distinction matters: making high contrast its own theme would mean choosing between readability and the era you actually wanted. This way you keep both.
Pick your era
Open the app, press , for Settings, and choose Theme.