How to make Shortcuts give you a weather forecast on iPad

The iPad infamously still lacks a built-in weather app. There are plenty of ways around this — you can ask Siri, you can use the Maps app to see the weather anywhere, or you can wait for your iPhone to give you a lock-screen forecast every morning.

Today we add a new method. We’ll make a quick shortcut that gets the weather at your current location, and displays it as a notification.

How to build a custom weather shortcut

This is a fun shortcut to build, because it lets you add all kinds of info to your weather forecast, almost without effort. To begin, launch the Shortcuts app and tap the button to create a new shortcut.

Then, in the left-hand column, type “weather” in the search bar. This will show you all the actions that work with weather. The one we’re interested in is Get Current Weather. This is built into the Shortcuts app. Tap to add it to the workflow panel (the section on the right). Make sure it’s set to get weather at the current location. You can also set a fixed location if you prefer.

On-demand custom weather forecast

Then, add the Show Notification action. This is where the fun starts. Tap inside this action, and the keyboard pops up. You can type anything in there, but you can also add variables. In this case, we want to add the results of the weather. To do so, tap the little Weather Conditions widget above the keyboard. It gets pasted into the notification’s body.

Then, tap on this newly pasted widget, and you’ll see a list of available info — location, precipitation chance, high and low temperatures, humidity and lots more. By adding more of these little widgets, you can build a custom weather notification. My version shows the current conditions. You can also choose to build a forecast by using the weather forecast action instead of the current weather action.

To activate this forecast, you can run it from inside the Shortcuts app (lame), or run it by tapping its widget in the Shortcuts section on the Today View (cool). And of course, it works just as well on the iPhone as on the iPad.