The main thing that I miss about Dark Sky is that it realized where I live. Not the larger city next door.
I live in a tiny alcove surrounded by hills and our weather can be up to 5 degrees cooler than the valley south of me.
Apple Weather just doesn't offer that precision.
The disappearance of Dark Sky is literally what Apple has been doing to the whole computer world. Enforcing their direction, because it's better, while taking away your choice.
There are certain things that shouldn't be summarized. Weather is one of them.
The Weather UI is a (failed) exercise of trying to reduce a days worth of weather in a single icon.
I'm not a phone user, so the presentation of weather for me always tends to look fairly different than anything you'd "typically" see on a phone.
That said, I have a hard time imagining how I could improve on the data density, clarity and depth of this 10 day forecast, customized by me, from wunderground.com
* 24hr temperature cycles
* cloud cover vs. sun
* wind speeds (with direction)
* precipitation likelihood and amounts
* barometric pressure
* overall conditions
Note only that, but I can mouseover the display and get per-hour specific details for every parameter.
During storm season, with 1 click I can get to the "wundermap" which gives me 45-60 mins of storm tracking display, allowing me to make my own guess on whether or not a given storm complex is going to hit us head on or not, using "local knowledge" to shape my conclusion.
I like that chart, though I wish there would be some uncertainty in the lines further out. Sometimes I want a sense of the trends, it isn't like I plan 10 days out based on precip numbers. Though a range would give me a direction to lean. Coordinating with friends who tell me about a chance of rain in a week as a reason to alter plans is frustrating.
It looks like the yr.no chart view that I've used on my phone for years. I appreciate having the pressure, precip, temp on separate but aligned charts to avoid too much density.
Weather representation is hard though. I care about different things at different times of year. In the winter: temp, freezing line, precip, wind speed/direction, and jet stream postion in 4-12 hour increments.
In the summer: temp, cloud cover, thunderstorm chance, precip on a 12 hour tto daily level. But I care about wind speed and direction on a hourly level for water activities.
In both cases I like an easy way to see the radar/satellite images and sometimes the model trends so I can see where precip or cloud cover is more or less.
It's 95% them, 5% my choices of what to show. There's a customize button just above the right corner of the actual display. Click on that, and select what parameters you want to see from the 10 options. I chose to show: Cloud, Humidity, Chance of Precipitation, Pressure, Temperature, Wind Speed.
Hope that helps. Oh, this is also the "10 day forecast". I never use the daily or hourly views.
Dark Sky was eerily accurate, sometimes to the minute. That was great because my dog hates rain. I've often dropped what I was doing immediately and get out earlier because of a Dark Sky notification. If it told me I had 25 minutes before rain started, I really had 25 minutes.
I've noticed that it got progressively less accurate the closer it got of the shutdown by Apple.
The iOS weather app is pretty inaccurate and borderline useless in comparison. It will tell me it's raining when it's not and vice/versa. Time predictions are so out of whack that they might as well not be there; they also get revised all the time.
I understand that weather can be finnicky and predictions are just that. But Dark Sky did it correctly and Apple does not. I wonder what was the point of acquiring them, if their UI is inferior (although pretty!) and so are the predictions.
My outdoor hobby is limited by rain (rock climbing), so I've gone through most of the weather apps. Dark Sky was by far the best, both for accuracy and visualization.
I'm in this thread to hopefully find an alternative, and wunderground.com looks like it might be the ticket.
I really miss Dark Sky. Apple choosing to kill the app was a huge mistake IMO. Despite them "integrating Dark Sky features" into Apple Weather, I still dislike the user interface and layout of Apple Weather in general. Dark Sky was everything I needed for weather. Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
I agree that killing off the standalone app was a mistake. It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared.
> Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? It seems to me that their usual mode of operation is to completely ignore feedback, and then after a decade or so, they come back with some portion of it and act like it's a thing they completely invented.
> It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared.
Didn't they give two year's notice?
> Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade?
Is there an instance of them taking a decade?
Five years, for sure. See butterfly keyboards - people could hate it, it could have more widely reported failures but they can't replace it without revising the whole laptop's design (which they do every five years).
Oh man I miss Dark Sky. I have yet to find a weather app as good. briefsky[0] was recently posted on here and I think I'll try using it for a while. Also of note is Pirate Weather[1], a weather API in the same style as Dark Sky.
Geometric Weather is a fantastic app with the same look and feel. Carrot Weather also just (?) added what is effectively a "DarkSky mode". It's lovely.
Geometric Weather looks good, but I'm not crazy about its Accuweather backend.
One newish app that's good (though it unfortunately doesn't have a status bar weather indicator) is omWeather[1], and it uses Open-Meteo as its backend.
Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net/) has replaced Dark Sky for me, a homescreen link to the website and it's doing a good job for at a glance weather and 'feels like' lookups.
Dark Sky was good, but had it's strange quirks too. On top of that some features were undiscoverable - for example it was possible to click bubbles on the right side of the graph to get detailed view of the hour. Very useful, I stumbled on it randomly after years of use.
Weather has same information, presented a bit in a different way. Sure, I think they could have done better job.
Most important component, however, are the models they use. Weather/Dark Sky models are good, but at some moment they diverge from Wundeground - another app I use. So I started paying for Windy, which allows you to see a view with 6 (!) different models. I'm not sure why I need that, but I love having this feature.
Carrot Weather added the "inline" view which replicates Dark Sky pretty well. [1] It's been an easy transition for me, although Carrot is more expensive.
Maybe on Apple devices. There's no option on Android devices to choose the API. Just a button to refresh and another that gives witty replies if you press it.
The very first thing I noticed in the screenshots was the presence of arrows in the cloud cover/radar image. This immediately conveys where the storm is headed.
In contrast, one of my least favorite parts of the Apple weather app is the radar view --- in order to see where a storm is headed I need to open the map, select the 24 hour forecast, wait for all the data to load (often several seconds, if not more!), and then let the whole animation play out. What would take me less than half a second on Dark Sky ends up taking me 10-30+ seconds on Apple Weather.
To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph. Then you need to click the thermostat icon and switch it to precipitation. Only then is the information displayed. Once it's onscreen, the precipitation graph in the Apple Weather app centers on the full day view (with the current time in the middle) rather than just the future, which is what most users care about.
That's not the same as putting it front-and-center. Yes, the information is there, but the interface design is garbage.
Not good enough. I'm going to be out for the whole day: do I need an umbrella? I want to know that immediately. It's such basic information that it needs to be always at hand.
There's definitely a taste / opinion component to any deep design critique. I think for many (for whom the post resonated), the ability to quickly glance at Dark Sky and understand relevant weather contextually was THE game changer.
It's a hard thing to discuss, because until you've felt the experience, it doesn't seem like a "big deal".
Some apps do use text to talk about the current / upcoming rain, but showing it visually makes it even easier. The ease of use is important because weather apps aren't meant to be that interactive (like a game). They're meant to be context-sensitive information graphics that let you drop in and out very very quickly.
Thank you for taking the time to write this article. I was disturbed about the shutdown of Darksky because I really loved the features of that app and reading your article took me on a nice walk down memory lane. Raising the discussion here has been not only been cathartic in that I now know I have a lot of company for my thoughts, but has also provided some alternatives to try to recapture the experience. I'm not a big fan of Apple Weather and at least now I have some options to explore.
As the author points out, text like that is inferior to embedding information in the graphic. The reason is that with text, I have to just "hope" that they've handled all the cases that I care about, and at the fidelity that is relevant to me. With a graphic, this information is always available, and combining multiple elements tells me more information than a single text snippet can. For example: "Oh, it's only going to be drizzly for like an hour, I'll be in a meeting around then anyways." That's a decision that 'rainy conditions expected around 3pm' does not help me with.
> As the author points out, text like that is inferior to embedding information in the graphic.
Apple Weather presents this information in graphical form as well. When I open the app, not only is what I need to know — "Rainy conditions expected around 7pm" — front and center, but just below that I can scroll through hours with rain percentages, and with another tap I can get as much detail as I could want.
> To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph.
To find it, you need to know that the interface is interactive the same way as other interfaces like control center are - clicking a 'tile' pops/navigates to more details.
You don't have to tap on temperature - tapping on the precipitation forecast will drill down to precipitation estimates.
Just know that Apple Weather (like Dark Sky before it) uses multiple different models, so the forecasts 15 minutes, 2 hours, and 1 day out are likely to be reasoned about entirely differently.
And even then, it's often plain wrong. A couple of weeks ago it was raining in my area at noon (a flood watch was active!) but the precipitation screen showed 0 rain that day, in the past and the future.
Well, this is quite a detailed analysis and I don't want to take a dump on it because it's obviously a good analysis. BUT. Masterpiece? I don't think so. Dark Sky's data visualization was all shiny gold and not enough real science.
Their radar map with all those pretty colors was super buggy, so much so that you couldn't trust it. If you move the map or zoom in, or pan around, the rain / radar data often would not move with the map. So you would have a 2x scaling issue with how large the rain area was.
Also, they never provided confidence information. They often made predictions that were wrong, and never informed you of how confident their forecasts were. But they would always show a 'flawless' representation of the data so you would be convinced it was right.
Yes yes, it was pretty. But it was not backed by science, and the data was misrepresented I'd say 100% of the time. You can't have a masterpiece of data visualization where a major component of the vis is 'looking pretty' and the factualness of it is ignored.
It's interesting reading this comment, because this perfectly aligns with my experience using the app on Android back before Apple shut it down. I agree with all of the article's points on how intuitive and helpful the UI was, and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement. But the predictions were constantly wrong.
I’ve replaced Dark Sky with Windy but, although Windy is quite good, it doesn’t answer the same questions that Dark Sky answered quickly (and the article does a good job of pointing out these questions).
Dark Sky was okay. As detailed here, it does a great job of centering on the actual user needs of weather app users.
Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot.
Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’
You know, northern Californians.
It was a poor fit for people whose weather landscape includes frequent storms; snowfall; temperature ranges that go down below freezing (seriously - dark sky’s temperature graphs never marked freezing temperatures for some reason); multiple types of precipitation; etc.
Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW, where the main concerns are just how rainy it will be that day, and the approximate high temperatures coming up. Nothing accurately forecasts (here) whether it will be freezing or whether precipitation will be snow/slush/hail/rain, but other apps like Apple's are absolutely horrific at forecasting precipitation even a few hours out. Stuff like showing 30% chance of rain in 1 hour, clear the rest of the day, when it just rains the entire day and the "forecast" continually shows that it will stop raining in 30 minutes.
> Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’
> Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW
I think you're actually in complete agreement with OP
Right? ‘It’s not only for Northern California! It works fine up as far as Seattle!’ is not exactly a refutation of my (slightly hyperbolically stated) thesis that Dark Sky’s human friendliness is not as global as people seem to think.
When does the temperature drop to freezing and negative windchill in PNW like OP mentioned were use cases not designed into the app as it is not of the target audience with areas of mild weather.
I live in the mountains in Colorado and DarkSky was by far the best UX for viewing upcoming weather. The way they presented projected hourly snowfall was especially good, as was the projected snowfall by day.
With Apple Weather, you get a snow icon and a percentage for future days. For DarkSky it was an actual projected snowfall amounts, which is so much more useful. Are we expecting 2 inches? Or 20?
On a daily basis, Dark Sky had a great graph of hourly projections. Apple Weather has a bar chart with no numbers unless you hover on each bar, and it will project 8 hours of snow in the hourly view but then the bar chart only shows a bar on one hour.
I said it was okay. Just don’t feel like it had the most incredible human-centric weather UI that is often touted for it.
When I evaluated it, my main concerns were things like ‘am I gonna have to dig the car out in the morning?’ and ‘is that thunderstorm heading right for me or just to one side?’ - and those were not things I felt Dark Sky did particularly well. The old weatherspark visualizations used to be much better, but they seem to have vanished.
Which is fine! Tools can be great for some things and not others! I just find it surprising that it is touted as having hot weather presentation ‘right’. I’m still waiting for better.
I dunno, I live in Washington, DC, which has many of those properties (snow, freezing temperatures, heavy thunderstorms in the summer), and knowing which ten-minute window in the next hour was the least likely to get me soaked if I wanted to pop out for coffee was still incredibly useful, and I have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. Certainly there were some days when the weather was shit regardless and there wasn't a good opening, but no app is going to remedy that.
I lived in both Florida and Massachusetts, using DarkSky was amazing in both climates. I think your geographical bias is more telling than your app usage.
I disagree. I'm a photographer in Minnesota and getting notified when rain was going to start and stop was really handy on wedding days. I also had it set to let me know if the next day was going to be windy so I could possibly postpone shoots.
I used to think the UK had all
the weather too. Then I moved to New England, which still doesn’t get all the weather, but compared to the UK, feels like the weather is turned up to 11.
What the UK has is changeable weather, which is, as I say, what dark sky excels at helping you with (‘will I need me brolly? Or will it blow away?’)
It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items.
The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult.
I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparable.
I feel like I lost a friend that I consulted with daily.
Can I just piggyback on this to shit on the iOS Weather app for a moment?
Whoever designed it doesn't understand the concept of daily max/min temperatures, and the daily low presented in the app is the lowest during that calendar day, rather than the forecast overnight low following the day. It drives me absolutely mad, because I can never reliably determine how cold it will get overnight without going into the hourly view (and even that could be inaccurate for fast-moving weather systems).
It's interesting you say that, because I have been under the impression that weather apps always show daily low temperatures based on the calendar day (midnight-to-midnight). I've always thought they could be improved by showing the overnight low, which you're saying is the case for some weather apps. Which ones are those?
It's also worth noting that the midnight-to-midnight scheme is a lot more well-defined than the alternative we're both advocating. What do you show as the low temperature for today if it's currently 3am and the temperature isn't going to drop until 3am tomorrow? If that temperature drop is displayed as today's low temperature, then I won't be able to discern whether it will get cold during this night (i.e. today between 1am and 7am) or the following night (i.e. between 7pm today and 7am tomorrow). Not to mention that cold systems can move in at any time, and it may be much colder at noon tomorrow than 3am tomorrow, so in many case "overnight low" isn't even what you care about.
Definitely not. It’s common in places where the weather actually changes due to things other than the time of day, i.e. where cold systems move in. For example, look at the forecasts in the Chicago area where tomorrow (March 23) it’s going to be a fair bit colder at noon than at 1am. This is not at all uncommon, and is in fact precisely why it’s important to check the weather forecast in the morning on normal days when you’re deciding what to wear.
But the broader point is that the utility of an overnight temperature is that it happens while most people are sleeping, and thus unable to respond to it.
Fluctuations while one is awake can be coped with.
IMHO, the most reasonable intuitive measures would be: overnight low, rain during the midnight-to-midnight day
Really anywhere where temperatures change frequently for reasons other than the time of day. Probably the vast majority of people who use temperature forecasts in consumer weather apps.
> But the broader point is that the utility of an overnight temperature is that it happens while most people are sleeping, and thus unable to respond to it.
> Fluctuations while one is awake can be coped with.
I couldn't disagree more. Surely the most common use case by far for quick checks of the daily forecast is simply to decide what to wear when you leave the house in the morning. If you're unhoused, or camping, or you work at night, or you're a gardener, then of course overnight temperature forecasts are also vital.
And the entire state of Colorado. It is not that uncommon for our daily high to be at 12am, or for the temperature to drop 30F between a midday high and dusk as a front moves in.
These aren't conditions you can describe with just two temperature points, no matter where they are anchored.
For overnight temperatures, many people just want badging to know if there is a frost/freeze condition - e.g., is there a weather condition they need to deal with while they would otherwise be sleeping.
They did the same for the weather on the Apple Watch. It used to show the next minimum temperature but sometime last year it changed to minimum within calendar day, which is just about useless.
In the case of Apple, Cupertino is a pretty boring weather locale. Sometimes you need to zipper your coat and once in awhile it rains.
Which also explains why iPhone headphone wires get brittle in moderately cold weather, and iPhones go into thermal shutdown mode at temperatures that are common in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the non-Bay Area parts of California.
Another example: Corporate HQs have world class internet access. No latency high bandwidth connections. If folks building lazy loading web interfaces had to use their stuff in rural North Dakota, much less outside the US, they'd be shocked at how terribly it performs and user-hostile it feels.
Piggybacking your piggyback, that graph for the temperature throughout the day looks pretty but damn terrible UX in comparison to dark sky. Hourly temperatures/rain/etc gives me everything I need at a glance without having to drag my finger to the time I am interested in.
Here's an egregious UX error in the Apple Weather app: when you look at the precipitation map, it animates the situation throughout the day, but the current time it's showing is only indicated by the cursor in a timeline at the bottom. Your location in the center in the map, where you want to look, only shows the current temperature and weather: it does not animate with the timeline and the rest of the map, and does not show the time the map is currently reflecting. So if you look at the center of the screen you have no idea what time's situation the map is showing, and if you look at the bottom you can see the time, but not the situation. You have to stop the animation, manually drag the cursor to "now", look at the storm pattern, then manually drag it an hour forward, look at the map again, etc.
I’m confused why the daily minimum would include times outside the day. That doesn’t seem like a daily minimum by definition. The way Apple does it is exactly how I assumed it would work.
It becomes useless when it was 32 degrees at midnight. But now, as I sit here on a Thursday morning, it shows the low for today as 28 degrees and tomorrow as 40 degrees. What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out? Will it be closer to 40 or continue dropping and be closer to freezing? Is it safe to put my sensitive plants back outside? Perhaps it shows 28 again but is that for early Friday morning or late Friday night?
In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn. That also happens to be the time of day when most of us are first leaving the house. That's a pretty important piece of information to have and it isn't there at a glance.
> In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn.
Probably true, and yet the counterexamples are when the temperature forecast is particularly important when I'm choosing what to wear. Any simplification of the temperature forecast into daily lows and highs will fail certain use cases, so I think it's very reasonable to make the daily lows and highs as well- and simply-defined as possible and provide an hourly forecast so that people can also check for the potential edge cases.
Why not both? Keep the normal highs and lows we expect from our weather stations and websites, then display the temperature variance in a view that doesn't require you to drill into the app view clicks / drags.
I don't see any defensible opinion to let the lows be during/before sunrise.
But the most important weather changes to see forecasts for are the ones caused by weather systems moving in which are mostly independent of the time of day. Those are the ones that catch you by surprise wearing the wrong clothes.
Absolutely this, I think OP has an atypical mental model of the daily boundaries of temperature, we’ve been conditioned to think of daily highs and lows from radio and local news television forecasts. You can’t just look at the app in isolation of decades of social conditioning that predate the iPhone and weather apps.
Yep, Dark Sky's way is standard. Weather.com and the like show the next low. Today in my area is actually the perfect example, currently ~40f. It shows a high of ~55f and a low of ~53f.
The daily low is the lowest temp of the day. It could very well be in the future. But it’s certainly not in the next day, and it’s not from a specific hour. If you want to see tomorrow mornings temps look at tomorrow’s hourly temps.
Do you expect the daily high to work the same? So maybe at 4pm it’s down from the daily high and now it shows today’s high is actually some temp around 3pm tomorrow?
I get what you’re saying but in no way is that a daily high. More like a next 24 hour high but even then, do you want that? That means if it’s 80F at 3pm today and 90F at 3pm tomorrow and it’s 3pm, then the high will be 90.
It’s much easier to just accurately categorize these by day/hour and let the user find what they care about instead of warping definitions to anticipate certain use cases.
How about we categorise it by the day/night cycles like we have since before we walked on 2 legs? Not some arbitrary time model we created that happens to divide the night cycle at midnight. Daytime max, overnight min.
absolutely the radio and local news television forecasts have always had daily high and low boundaries, not sure what is up with these people’s atypical mental models? They must not have listened to the news on the radio or on television growing up? Why should an app create a UI design pattern that goes against the majority of people’s mental models.
Daily min/max by calendar day has never been a standard.
Weather is not divided by some arbitrary time humans created. Max and min temperatures occur overwhelmingly in their respective day and night cycle. Adding some arbitrary cut off point in the middle of those cycles just makes comprehending max/min temps unnecessarily more difficult then it needs to be.
What if we set the calendar day to change at midday, would we start reporting max temps up to 12pm, past 12pm? How useful do you think that info would be?
People are interested in the overnight minimum, not a confusing minimum that could be either early morning or just before midnight depending on the weather at the time.
And it wasn't just how it looked either. Dark Sky was a weather app that was actually accurate for what you wanted it for.
It really frustrates me that Apple completely killed off the product. I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.
>I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.
Shot in the dark - Apple wants you to live and die within Apple's ecosystem, using only Apple products. Doesn't matter if they own Dark Sky, it's not "Apple Weather", and that's what they want - iThis, iThat, Apple Something, Mac Whatever. Dark Sky also didn't look or feel like the rest of Apple's products, and they want consistency and are not about to redesign the rest of their software line to fit with Dark Sky's much-loved UI/UX.
Why redo everything you've done when you can just kill off this one little thing and force everyone back over to you?
Counterpoint: Beats' revenue far eclipses that of Dark Sky. Apple recognized that it is its own cash-cow of a beast, and purchased them both for the revenue and because they could ensure that the product is more closely integrated with Apple products.
Shazam, I can only take a stab at this one. Perhaps it's a name thing? "Nobody", eg the public at large (so, set aside the passionate Dark Sky love you see in this thread), gives a shit about weather apps, at least on a broad scale. The default option is fine. You don't say, "Dark Sky it", you say, "Check the weather". When you wanna know what's playing, most people say, "Shazam it". Apple and Android integration of this into Siri/search came way later, far after "Shazam it" became the standard phrase. There's no "obvious" replacement, like there is with the default weather app.
Whatever model the Weather app uses has been hopelessly unreliable and at times downright incorrect. Dark Sky wasn’t always accurate (no model is), but it seemed to match reality more often than not.
Have you noticed how many moves they've made to make it easy to give up your location privacy to Apple? Emergency SOS is the latest one, complete with lots of submarine news articles about how OMG It Saved My Life!! This paper has many many more examples: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
To make matters worse, Apple killed off the web version too, and didn't replace it with anything.
The Dark Sky website was brilliant as well. It loaded quickly, wasn't covered in ads, and the UX was comparable to their app.
I haven't really found anything to replace it with yet. I've defaulted to weather.gov, but the UX isn't really there yet (it's great for storms, or when you need to drill down into good data though).
It boggles the mind, doesn't it? The equivalent of a bunch of food and housing was spent just so something useful could be taken out of half of the population's hands. Just think about that, overall social utility decreased and someone spent money to make it happen. Absolutely parasitic behavior.
> It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items.
"I hate them so I will only give them a tiny bit less money" is why it will never change
I think a big problem is that there are few choices because of constant consolidation. This is reflected in two ways:
a) every big tech company tries to do a ton of stuff. I'm not happy with this weather app. Usually the market would reflect this by me buying a different weather app. However, Apple isn't in the weather app market, they are in the phone and computer market. If I buy a different weather app, Apple actually gets more money! Buying a different phone because Apple made the decision to kill my favorite weather app is now muddled in with so many other factors and Apple and their shareholders are unlikely to link a drop in phone sales to killing the weather app. Now I also need to look at the very few real competitors and probably have issues with them as well. It's a mess because they all do too much. Maybe I don't want Android devices because Google built Bart without disclosing training sources. What a mess!
b) someone builds something nice and it just gets killed by an incumbant. No real competition between most startups and incumbants. It's more like a buyer/seller relation
I'd love to see this all fixed in my utopia by prohibiting acquisitions and instead force companies to fight for customers. But I'm sure that would need to happen globally to avoid putting our own companies at a disadvantage where they'll just get their lunch stolen by companies that aren't limited like that. I'm also sure this solution has other side effects I cannot think of.
Ok, let's play this game. I don't like what Apple did to Darksky, so I'll switch to Android. What do I do when Google inevitably does something similar, who do I switch to then?
I still haven't forgiven Apple for killing off Aperture.
To date nothing has come close to Aperture's seamless blending of image organizing, editing, and metadata enrichment. I'm not holding my breath that an app that feels like DarkSky will ever come along.
Government sponsored apps are great because there's no advertising, they aren't selling your data, and they are free. They usually pay to collect the data, run the models, and provide the API anyway. Providing the app is the cheap part.
I like Weawow. It's proven accurate regarding weather trends, but it tends to be overly dramatic. I'm guessing this is related to living in a valley, as the weather to the north and south seems to match their forecast better.
It has the data that's indispensable to me: precipitation amount per hour. I don't care as much about how likely it is to rain, I care about whether I'm going to get sprinkled on or drenched.
I use Weawow, too, but it's UI is very cumbersome in terms of getting quickly to what you care about. I have Meteograms' widget on my homescreen to get precip/hr and the core metrics similar to the wunderground 10 day view, but I find it much easier to read a daily forecast presented in a more traditional manner so go from Meteogram (tactical) to Weawow (strategic) forecasts.
I've been using Today Weather on Android ever since Dark Sky was killed off there. It looks nice, lots of different data sources, and the $7 lifetime
Premium Version is a good price.
fwiw, I paid for a lifetime sub to eHD Weather (by Elecont) ... back in 2013 and still use it. Moreover, the dev still responds to emails within a couple hours. If I can get 10 years of use out of an app for $5, that's excellent value!
Only if you sign up for the Apple Developer Program, comply with all their rules and expectations, and not be surprised if they ban you from using it with no explanation whatsoever.
Yes because out of the millions of app submissions that happen every year, you are likely to “be banned” for some arbitrary reason that is not spelled out.
That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…
> That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…
Apple products are popular among consumers and developers in spite of their many user-hostile decisions precisely because there are few alternatives, all of which have substantial disadvantages as well.
So if Apple products are “user hostile” then why are enough users happily spending twice as much on iPhones and more on Macs to make Apple the most valuable company in the world?
Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
For one thing, from what I understand (I don't develop mobile apps, and I don't own an Apple phone) Apple forbids applications that provide features already built into the phone. That's why even Firefox on iOS is just a skin over Safari.
So if Apple Weather (or whatever they call the in-house weather app) comes with the phone, then your "same thing but different" app will not be made available in the Apple app store.
This is also not true. There are plenty of podcast apps, weather apps, notes apps, music apps, streaming video apps. I can’t think of a single bundled app where there are not plenty of alternatives.
It does a really nice job of showing me most of what Dark Sky showed, in a similarly easy-to-glance-at format once I spent a little time learning to read its graphs.
I think Carrot Weather has a lot of graphs directly ripped off from Dark Sky but the constant attempts to upsell me to a subscription plan while I was playing with it really turned me off, as did the "what political alignment would you like the sweary forecast to have" switch.
Nice thanks for the iOS rec. I've been a big fan of FlowX (https://flowx.io/) on Android which has had a similar graph/visualization with the addition of also having a radar view.
BTW, I'm in the process of porting Flowx to Apple. It's not as complete as the Android version but it's in beta testing if you'd like to join. Just message me and I can send an invite.
Hey, me too. Once I downloaded Weather Strip I had trouble understanding how its display methodology wasn't just the standard across weather apps -- I was hit with a serious “wait, why isn't everything like this?” moment. I'd never seen another app that makes the weather so quickly grokkable.
Brilliant article, but I'm surprised notifications don't get a mention, this was the killer feature of Dark Sky for me - notifications warning me of imminent rain / storm / snow and notifications telling me when it's going to stop and for how long. Made living with a dog that hates rain much easier. None of this has been brought over to the stock weather app properly, that notifies me of maybe one in every hundred rainfalls which is completely useless.
My go to weather site is:
https://kachelmannwetter.com/
Run by a former weatherman it uses a number of forecast models and even lets you see whether a gust of air from a specific region is going to reach you (interesting if you live in Europe and a Ukranian NPP blows up)
Related: Weather apps could in general be better, not just in terms of visualization. One thing which always annoys me is how they handle rain predictions. They give "probabilities" for rain. But what do those mean? The probability that it rains for at least one minute in the given time frame? And with at least x mm/inches of rain coming down? And isn't a low probability of short and weak rain totally different from a equally low probability of strong or long rain?
But there is a perfectly elegant alternative: Just use the expected amount of rainfall. The epected value combines both amount and probability of rainfall in one single number, without being highly arbitrary like other approaches, such as the usual reporting of plain "probabilities" with unclear interpretation.
(Of course one could add to the expected rainfall amount also the variance, to distinguish more certain predictions from more uncertain ones, though this information might often not even be that important.)
Expected value is already what most forecasts show. Expected value conveys information poorly in some common cases, like thunderstorms in the summer. It is very different to hear there's a 20% chance of a thunderstorm, dropping an inch of rain, vs. a 100% chance of .2" rain - the former needs a backup plan to deal with rain, the latter needs to plan for rain. Hence I prefer the text forecasts from the NWS, which list an amount possible, plus more in thunderstorms, rather than a bare number.
Meanwhile the 'probability' listed in forecasts is also well defined as an expected value - it's (probability of X% rain coverage) * (X %), over all X. (Rain is defined as > .01")
Okay, in very high variance cases like thunderstorms the expected value might indeed not be enough, but there are usually additional storm warnings for that anyway. My claim is just that the expected amount of rainfall is much more interesting than the probability of rainfall. Yet the apps I know display probabilities prominently, not expected values.
I tend to use probability more for decision making - usually trying to determine whether I need to bring an umbrella or rain gear with me on a given day. If the probability is low I can usually just look out the window and time my trips outside when it’s not raining and probably get by without rain gear. Whereas a high probability means I’m probably going to need to go out in the rain at some point, and need to pack appropriately.
I also do a lot of cycling, and total duration spent in the rain tends to matter more to me than the amount of rainfall. I don’t mind riding through a quick downpour or two on a ride if I can dry out in between, but spending several hours in constant rain can be miserable (and hypothermia becomes a concern) - even if it’s light rain.
Of course expected amount definitely has uses, too. For example if there is rain forecast for tonight, and I’m trying to determine the probability that a field will be usable for practice in the morning.
Anyway I would say that both probability and expected amount are important, and any competent weather app should offer both. The Apple Weather app only shows hourly forecasts for expected amount, and that alone would be enough to be a dealbreaker for me.
Not a meteorologist, just a computer science guy that read a couple of papers.
My understanding is that the probabilities in weather forecasts aren't a probability at all, but rather a coverage measure. Local weather models are computed in discrete grid coordinates of say 10km. Every grid cell of 10km^2 has a single set of computed forecast data. The percentage is a measure of how much of that area received rain in the timeframe, not of probability of rain, but of coverage of rain.
Author here -- I wholeheartedly agree. I recommend reading up on some of the research in uncertainty visualization. There's a good example of visualizing the probability that a bus will arrive in the next X minutes that feels similar.
Relatedly, I'm fasinated by how much human judgement goes into those numbers. A meteorologist with local expertise looks at a few different models, decides which are more likely to be accurate, and then fills out a grid.
Just to hop on this, the standard is counter intuitive for rain probability. I'm annoyed, but also fascinated by how much it "makes sense" when I have read about it, but it also "makes no sense" when I just want to know: should I get my jacket? :)
Loose definition (with errors and assumptions, but helps some without getting into actual probability math):
If it says "30%" - many of us have heard "30% chance of showers". It is NOT "30% chance of showers"; it actually is "100% percent chance of rain, over 30% of the area, within a given time, of a particular amount of rain."
Which is STILL (to me), difficult for the average person to comprehend.
PRECIPITATION PROBABILITY
The probability of precipitation forecast is one of the most least understood elements of the weather forecast. The probability of precipitation has the following features:
..... The likelihood of occurrence of precipitation is stated as a percentage
..... A measurable amount is defined as 0.01" (one hundredth of an inch) or more
(usually produces enough runoff for puddles to form)
..... The measurement is of liquid precipitation or the water equivalent of frozen
precipitation
..... The probability is for a specified time period (i.e., today, this afternoon, tonight,
Thursday)
..... The probability forecast is for any given point in the forecast area
To summarize, the probability of precipitation is simply a statistical probability of 0.01" inch of more of precipitation at a given area in the given forecast area in the time period specified. Using a 40% probability of rain as an example, it does not mean (1) that 40% of the area will be covered by precipitation at given time in the given forecast area or (2) that you will be seeing precipitation 40% of the time in the given forecast area for the given forecast time period.
Let's look at an example of what the probability does mean. If a forecast for a given county says that there is a 40% chance of rain this afternoon, then there is a 40% chance of rain at any point in the county from noon to 6 p.m. local time.
This point probability of precipitation is predetermined and arrived at by the forecaster by multiplying two factors:
Forecaster certainty that precipitation will form or move into the area X
Areal coverage of precipitation that is expected
(and then moving the decimal point two places to the left)
Using this, here are two examples giving the same statistical result:
(1) If the forecaster was 80% certain that rain would develop but only expected to cover 50% of the forecast area, then the forecast would read "a 40% chance of rain" for any given location. (2) If the forecaster expected a widespread area of precipitation with 100% coverage to approach, but he/she was only 40% certain that it would reach the forecast area, this would, as well, result in a "40% chance of rain" at any given location in the forecast area.
Yeah that definition makes sense. It's indeed the probability you would get at least 0.01" of rain if we assume you are equally likely to be located anywhere in the forecast area.
But for deciding for "getting your jacket", the expected amount of rainfall seems much more relevant. Basically, you don't need a jacket if the rainfall is very unlikely, or weak, or short. In all those cases the expected amount will be low.
The explanation of the flaw (if there is one) in the temperature display doesn’t make sense. Both apps are scaling the temperature bars in the same way. The Weather app is just putting a dark background behind the “pills” and left/right aligning the numbers. The pills/bars themselves are the same on both.
I would just like an app that has a functional precipitation map view. Both Dark Sky and the iOS Weather app have been horribly unreliable. Sometimes I can zoom in/out and it will/would work but it's amazing how often it doesn't.
The Apple app has been even worse than Dark Sky was at this.
I'm a big fan of Weather Underground's 10 day forecast graph. Like Dark Sky, you can see the temperature ebb and flow, plus wind speeds, cloud cover, rain percentages (and amounts). One chart tells me every aspect of the weather that I need.
Instead of an app, I just have a bookmark on my home screen.
Weather underground's 10 day forecast, especially the expected precipitation graph is FANTASTIC! I've found it to be very reliable for predicting real rainfall amounts for planning outdoor activities.
Too bad they don't show it on mobile though!
Does anyone have a recommendation for something similar? The usability of the WU app is pretty awful.
Meh. Dark sky visualization design was nothing special. The pinnacle of beautiful, compact, data rich weather apps remains Weather Underground back in its day before it got bought up and shredded. Now there was an weather app that could show you a week’s worth of weather at a glance.
When I used to use dark sky the radar map was awful. Most frames seemed to be empty data and the animations were very jerky. At first I thought it was a temporary issue but it never got fixed even after many years of use. Did anyone else notice that?
Another Dark Sky thread, another opportunity to ask the community if anyone knows about Apple doing research with the barometers in their phones. Dark Sky claimed they 'did' but they never expanded on what that meant for them. Did they actually use the barometer data collected from the app? Or did it just get sent to /dev/null as I suspect?
And if Apple bought that code, did they use it themselves? Is Apple doing anything to improve weather forecast accuracy in the main weather models by running data assimilation on cleaned barometer data?
If not it is such a wasted opportunity that I just get so angry about. If so....please tell us more.
I suspect barometer data from phones would be junk unless you can correlate it with other data. The phone’s barometer is sensitive enough to detect the pressure difference (altitude change) of a few cm. That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather.
Yes, but, significant work was done at an academic level between 2011 and 2017, researchers at universities, grad student projects, etc, that resulted in usable data being extracted. I worked on this problem for ~10 years off and on. It is absolutely doable.
Especially since you don't actually _need_ raw pressure data to be useful. Pressure rate of change over time is still useful and produces improved accuracy in some local forecasts.
But not only that, the researchers at UW under Cliff Mass found that you can do on-device ML to clean the quality of the data, remove errors, and live-adjust to MSLP on-device, without even needing the dense network of sensors nearby for error correction.
It's 100% doable, but it just takes some hard science and effort.
> That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather
Yes, but, the noise problem was solved half a decade ago.
Huh. This is why I love HN. I didn’t know about that but looking up these papers to see if this approach would be useful to some other stuff I’m working on with similar-ish noise problems that conventional algorithms aren’t working for.
A 10cm change in elevation at sea level results in a 0.0001% change in atmospheric pressure [0]. On the other hand, weather-relevant pressure changes operate on scales of ~0.1% [1]. By my math, a small weather-relevant pressure change would be equivalent of someone changing their elevation by 100 meters.
Additionally, on a modern phone the barometric data can be adjusted against the accelerometer and GPS to mitigate changes in elevation (especially relative to, as you say, a slow-moving measurement).
Why say "not really" when you can simply test this yourself with a sensor dumping app. Planes have been using this technology for about a hundred years with accuracy down to the foot.
It isn't the GPS or position of the device you need to correlate, its trustworthy data. Is the device on an elevator, or did the pressure actually drop?
> Page not found (404)
> Request Method: GET
> Request URL: http://flowx.io/privacy/
> Raised by: wagtail.core.views.serve
> You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.
They tout excellent app UX but the website has a lot of rough edges visually.
Again, not discounting their work. I'm still going to install and try out, but initial impressions matter.
I'm not a fan of website - they have become complex. I'm currently looking into static pages as a replacement.
That said, Flowx has many moving parts: app development, data servers, data processing, support, forum, website, and others. My main focus is app development and probably the least focus is the website.
I believe they are still a team of one, and have focused on app progress and efficiency at the expense of bugs & loose ends that would typically be handled in a larger organization with dedicated teams for that sort of thing. I bet they would
Personally I find it charming. That is until I run into a security issue.
I've actually already looked into the DEBUG=True issue just now. Setting it to false causes an "Internal Server Issue".
So do I spend hours looking for a fix, look into replacing it with a static pages site (I'm thinking Hugo) or just go back to porting Flowx to Apple :-)
Setting DEBUG = False doesn't cause in Internal Server Issue. The issue is caused by something else, having DEBUG = True just means Django will return a detailed error page, instead of a generic 500 error page.
IIRC, DEBUG = True also used to leak memory, which doesn't matter so much for local development, where it's intended to be used.
I changed DEBUG = False and I get an "Internal Server Error" - you can check it now while I have a quick go at finding the cause.
I want to try static page generators (Hugo) instead since they are easier to maintain. So it's a prioritization question - do I spend time fixing this bug or spend the time on migrating.
I have switched to "windy.com" (not the confusingly similarly-named windy.app), not because it has an amazing UI, but because it's one of the few weather apps that lets me see the output of the forecasting models directly. Emphasis on the "s", it supports multiple models and you can switch between them. In the USA, the "HRRR" model is freakishly accurate over the next 72 hours.
Everyone talks about UI, but you can have the most amazing UI in the world and it would be useless if it was presenting you with bad data.
> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands.
While this is true on the multi-day range for sure, what really made Dark Sky magical was its to-the-minute prediction of rain.
If Dark Sky said "rain in 22 minutes", you had 18-26 minutes to walk a dog before getting wet.
I'm not sure I completely see the authors point about "Preserving temperature magnitudes in ranges", could someone help me understand?
Specifically, I don't understand this: "all temperature ranges are rescaled to take up the same amount of space in the app.", since it seems like both the Dark Sky and Weather.app views use pills that don't cover the x axis, as expected.
In Apple Watch, the min and max values (the numeric values left / right of the pills) are all aligned vertically on top of each other. In Dark Sky, they aren't aligned because the horizontal position is driven by the min and max values themselves. This is subtle but CRUCIAL for information graphics / software, where "glance-ability" is so so important.
Wait, where is the Apple Watch in this? You mean iOS?
In both screenshots of that image, the horizontal position of the pills are driven by the temperature. I don't see the difference other than where the min/max label is placed.
Does anyone know why apple acquired them just to shut it down?
It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design.
To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened
The weather data actually was pretty unique in that a lot of the rain / snow predictions were based on visually analysing the satellite imagery. I'd understand buying it just for that reason, but to then seemingly leave that out of the stock weather app seems bizarre. (I'm guessing they haven't ported that to the stock app as the stock app is dreadful at predicting imminent rain)
Did Apple include the local weather prediction in their app? That was the other impressive part of Dark Sky. The combination of prediction and design was why Dark Sky was so good.
I use Android and never used the nice app, but used the predictions in other apps. Knowing when it was going to rain was really handy. Apps now their own predictions but not as good.
The Dark Sky API was very popular, and at the time many weather apps on iOS did sketchy things with people's data. I sensed that Apple maybe wanted to provide a free weather API for weather apps to make it easier for anyone to make a weather app.
I ended up combining multiple forecast providers in a single chart and can't use (and don't need to) anything else. There were some good apps but most don't really help orientation within the chart or maintaining the chart scale.
I really liked Dark Sky for the notifications and rain intensity charts. But for me in the central UK the map _never_ worked properly for me. Only fragments of the map would load, for some of the time range, and the extrapolation parts never worked properly.
Unfortunately the new apple weather version seems to have inherited exactly the same map flaws.
I can't help but remember back when they got purchased and we Android users lamented that we were losing it and Apple was going to ruin it, and many of the responses were "Haha, you should've bought an iPhone, Dark Sky is going to be great with Apple's financial support!"
Similarly, IBM bought Weather Underground, deprecated both Storm and Wunderstation apps with excellent visualizations, and then never bothered to release anything that was worth using.
I keep Storm on an iPhone and look at it every so often, even though it no longer retrieves weather data.
I went so far as to buy the Carrot premium version which allows you to get pretty close to the DS app with some settings. I don't mind paying for good design. The Apple weather app is laughingly antithetical to usual Apple design standards. Somewhere, Steve is not amused.
Anyone else notice how inaccurate the iOS weather app has gotten in iOS 16? It used to be very accurate in terms of rain/snow in California, but recently it's just completely wrong. I end up going to weather.com to get an accurate report.
Down in Melbourne, Australia it’s regularly 5-10 degrees wrong.
It’s like they got a 7 day forecast, and never updated it.
Something must have happened this year, because it used to be very accurate.
Now, if if you want accurate weather (down under) you need to use the pretty good BOM app. But, it doesn’t have a Home Screen widget, or watch complications.
Dark Sky was fine and all, but in my view it didn't even come close to the elegant perfection of their precusor forecast.io's secret-for-no-good-reason and then canceled-for-no-good-reason /lines interface.
The closing of Dark Sky was a tremendous loss. We went from having minute-accurate weather forecasts to having daily forecasts like the ones from a century ago. It was devastating.
The UI always kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Elements of it were neat, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. The real reason it succeeded was a lack of advertisements tbh.
The article makes it sound like Apple just used Dark Sky as a backend and threw everything else away.
In fact it seems that they inspired heavily from Dark Sky's UI as well. In my opinion iOS now has a very clever and polished Weather app that contains many of the features mentioned in the article.
You’re correct. I used Dark Sky for years and switched to the default iOS app when Apple bought Dark Sky and added all of the functionality to Weather.
I did prefer the design of Dark Sky, since the data was larger and more visually separate from the background, allowing it to be more readable at a glance. But I found that after the big update they had essentially the same functionality and the same UI.
It might be functionally the same e.g. It only shows conditions for the next 5 hours - not all day - how can you tell if you need a raincopat if you go ot. I am on an iPhone in portrait mode. DarkSky showed this as a column of data Weather as a row. This is fundamental to the whole UI.
Author here -- Apple was definitely inspired by Dark Sky but IMO it's hard to argue that it's a replacement.
If you compare the # of clicks it takes and the amount of time it takes to interpret information for the same task for Dark Sky vs the Apple Weather app, it becomes clear that the Apple Weather app "isn't quite there yet". But I hope it will be soon!
If your needs are straightforward, then the Weather app is a pretty good replacement.
Oh, great, yet another UI masterpiece swallowed by the insatiable maw of refinement culture at Apple. "Dark Sky" app was only a weather app, but it looked goth. It was our weather app, and it was beautiful in its simplicity. Now we're left with the soulless husk that is Apple Weather. But hey, why not? Let's strip away every last shred of uniqueness and character in the name of "refinement." Sigh. Guess I'll just go back to waiting for my bones to ache for my forecasts.
Can you please not fulminate on HN? You may not owe big-corporate app-suppressers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it—we're trying for something else here.
My wife often asks me "but why would you care about the weather?" and I have to say that over the years I've either been ground down or simply come to understand her way of thinking. Yes it's sort of exciting to see graphs and charts and maps and stuff, but really - do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No. Do I need an alert to tell me it's going to rain soon? No.
So, yeh, Dark Sky was beautiful but I'm not sure (for me anyway) a weather app is the necessity that many people claim it is.
Do you do anything outdoors? Sports? Hike? Drive? Own a home that is affected by storm systems? Commute on transit systems that are affected by the changing weather?
Sure. All the time - I'm a runner, a walker, I have teen kids who like walking, we have a dog. But is any of this really changed by knowing it's going to rain? Nope. I stick my nose out on a morning - if it's cold, I put on a warm coat. If it's going to rain, I put on something rainproof. No need for an app. Or, sadly, a chart or a graph...
How do you know if it's going to rain? And how do you know what the temperature will be midday based on how it feels in the morning? I'm honestly just curious, these things are very variable in all the places I've lived. The presence or absence of clouds is not a great predictor of rain, and depending on the day it might be 20 degrees warmer in the afternoon or 0 degrees warmer.
Obviously I can imagine living without a weather app, but I genuinely can't imagine having one but not finding it useful. One of the things people loved about Dark Sky was not just knowing whether it is or isn't going to rain, but that it's going to rain in precisely 35 minutes, I have time to bike to the store instead of driving. I used this a lot and it was very accurate.
I guess I'm fairly relaxed about it - I mean, I can tell if it's going to rain imminently because it ...feels like it.
Don't get me wrong, I did love DS and the accuracy was insane - it's just that my wife pointed out that I probably don't actually need to know this stuff. As she would say - "does it really matter?" - I mean, if I get wet, so what? I think over time I've come to agree with her :-)
I think it depends a lot on where you live. Some places have predictable weather (rainy all day, or sunny in the afternoons, or whatever) but other places see random storms with no rhyme or reason.
In those latter markets, something that tells you it’s about to rain is super useful.
Indeed. When I lived in CA, I probably checked the weather twice a year. Now that I live in TX, I check the weather daily and often multiple times a day! It was a surprising, but obvious, change after living most of my life without seasons and dramatic weather events.
The main thing that I miss about Dark Sky is that it realized where I live. Not the larger city next door.
I live in a tiny alcove surrounded by hills and our weather can be up to 5 degrees cooler than the valley south of me.
Apple Weather just doesn't offer that precision.
The disappearance of Dark Sky is literally what Apple has been doing to the whole computer world. Enforcing their direction, because it's better, while taking away your choice.
There are certain things that shouldn't be summarized. Weather is one of them.
The Weather UI is a (failed) exercise of trying to reduce a days worth of weather in a single icon.
I currently use https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=34.1823&lon=-1...
I'm not a phone user, so the presentation of weather for me always tends to look fairly different than anything you'd "typically" see on a phone.
That said, I have a hard time imagining how I could improve on the data density, clarity and depth of this 10 day forecast, customized by me, from wunderground.com
https://imgur.com/5PIiB1h.png
You can see clearly:
Note only that, but I can mouseover the display and get per-hour specific details for every parameter.During storm season, with 1 click I can get to the "wundermap" which gives me 45-60 mins of storm tracking display, allowing me to make my own guess on whether or not a given storm complex is going to hit us head on or not, using "local knowledge" to shape my conclusion.
I like that chart, though I wish there would be some uncertainty in the lines further out. Sometimes I want a sense of the trends, it isn't like I plan 10 days out based on precip numbers. Though a range would give me a direction to lean. Coordinating with friends who tell me about a chance of rain in a week as a reason to alter plans is frustrating.
It looks like the yr.no chart view that I've used on my phone for years. I appreciate having the pressure, precip, temp on separate but aligned charts to avoid too much density.
Weather representation is hard though. I care about different things at different times of year. In the winter: temp, freezing line, precip, wind speed/direction, and jet stream postion in 4-12 hour increments.
In the summer: temp, cloud cover, thunderstorm chance, precip on a 12 hour tto daily level. But I care about wind speed and direction on a hourly level for water activities.
In both cases I like an easy way to see the radar/satellite images and sometimes the model trends so I can see where precip or cloud cover is more or less.
This looks similar to what I designed for myself using Meteogram[1].
[1] https://meteograms.com/ (I use the Android app)
wunderground 10 day is about as good as it gets
Do you mind sharing how you set that forecast UI up?
It's 95% them, 5% my choices of what to show. There's a customize button just above the right corner of the actual display. Click on that, and select what parameters you want to see from the 10 options. I chose to show: Cloud, Humidity, Chance of Precipitation, Pressure, Temperature, Wind Speed.
Hope that helps. Oh, this is also the "10 day forecast". I never use the daily or hourly views.
doesnt say what it feels like, so immediately not useful for me
As mentioned in another reply, in the "Customize" list you can literally add "Feels like"
Dark Sky was eerily accurate, sometimes to the minute. That was great because my dog hates rain. I've often dropped what I was doing immediately and get out earlier because of a Dark Sky notification. If it told me I had 25 minutes before rain started, I really had 25 minutes.
I've noticed that it got progressively less accurate the closer it got of the shutdown by Apple.
The iOS weather app is pretty inaccurate and borderline useless in comparison. It will tell me it's raining when it's not and vice/versa. Time predictions are so out of whack that they might as well not be there; they also get revised all the time.
I understand that weather can be finnicky and predictions are just that. But Dark Sky did it correctly and Apple does not. I wonder what was the point of acquiring them, if their UI is inferior (although pretty!) and so are the predictions.
Totally. Using Dark Sky felt a little bit like a superpower.
My outdoor hobby is limited by rain (rock climbing), so I've gone through most of the weather apps. Dark Sky was by far the best, both for accuracy and visualization.
I'm in this thread to hopefully find an alternative, and wunderground.com looks like it might be the ticket.
I really miss Dark Sky. Apple choosing to kill the app was a huge mistake IMO. Despite them "integrating Dark Sky features" into Apple Weather, I still dislike the user interface and layout of Apple Weather in general. Dark Sky was everything I needed for weather. Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
I agree that killing off the standalone app was a mistake. It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared.
> Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? It seems to me that their usual mode of operation is to completely ignore feedback, and then after a decade or so, they come back with some portion of it and act like it's a thing they completely invented.
> It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared.
Didn't they give two year's notice?
> Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade?
Is there an instance of them taking a decade?
Five years, for sure. See butterfly keyboards - people could hate it, it could have more widely reported failures but they can't replace it without revising the whole laptop's design (which they do every five years).
Oh man I miss Dark Sky. I have yet to find a weather app as good. briefsky[0] was recently posted on here and I think I'll try using it for a while. Also of note is Pirate Weather[1], a weather API in the same style as Dark Sky.
[0] https://briefsky.app/
[1] https://pirateweather.net
Also Merry Sky[1], which uses the Pirate Weather API. Open-Meteo is also interesting.
[1]: https://merrysky.net [2]: https://open-meteo.com
MerrySky is so good.
Geometric Weather is a fantastic app with the same look and feel. Carrot Weather also just (?) added what is effectively a "DarkSky mode". It's lovely.
Geometric Weather looks good, but I'm not crazy about its Accuweather backend.
One newish app that's good (though it unfortunately doesn't have a status bar weather indicator) is omWeather[1], and it uses Open-Meteo as its backend.
[1]: https://github.com/woheller69/omweather
Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net/) has replaced Dark Sky for me, a homescreen link to the website and it's doing a good job for at a glance weather and 'feels like' lookups.
Thanks - briefsky looks the part, although it's disappointing there's no map
briefsky is what I switched to. I found the Open-Meteo feels-like numbers to be way off in NYC but Pirate Weather has been fine.
Dark Sky was good, but had it's strange quirks too. On top of that some features were undiscoverable - for example it was possible to click bubbles on the right side of the graph to get detailed view of the hour. Very useful, I stumbled on it randomly after years of use.
Weather has same information, presented a bit in a different way. Sure, I think they could have done better job.
Most important component, however, are the models they use. Weather/Dark Sky models are good, but at some moment they diverge from Wundeground - another app I use. So I started paying for Windy, which allows you to see a view with 6 (!) different models. I'm not sure why I need that, but I love having this feature.
Carrot Weather added the "inline" view which replicates Dark Sky pretty well. [1] It's been an easy transition for me, although Carrot is more expensive.
[1]: http://meetcarrot.com/weather/goodbyedarksky.html
Same for https://weathergraph.app
Thanks for the mention! Weathergraph author here - any question anyone?
Well, I tried to install this on Android and was met with "unable to connect to server."
I wonder if Carrot is using the Dark Sky API.
Carrot lets you pick your data source [1]. One of the options is the Dark Sky API which is still operating until March 31 [2].
[1]: https://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/
[2]: https://darksky.net/dev
Well perhaps March 21st. Carrot seems not to be working withe Dark Sky now but does with other sources.
In the UK the DarkSky source data also appears better.
Unfortunately the MetOffce app is not good.
Maybe on Apple devices. There's no option on Android devices to choose the API. Just a button to refresh and another that gives witty replies if you press it.
I don't have an option to pick my data source. Theres just a "retry" button
Coincidentally carrot is down too
The very first thing I noticed in the screenshots was the presence of arrows in the cloud cover/radar image. This immediately conveys where the storm is headed.
In contrast, one of my least favorite parts of the Apple weather app is the radar view --- in order to see where a storm is headed I need to open the map, select the 24 hour forecast, wait for all the data to load (often several seconds, if not more!), and then let the whole animation play out. What would take me less than half a second on Dark Sky ends up taking me 10-30+ seconds on Apple Weather.
The second complaint mentioned in the article:
>Is there anything that has the precipitation graph similar to dark sky
The precipitation graph is in the Weather app, so it's unclear why this is being included as a complaint about the Weather app?
To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph. Then you need to click the thermostat icon and switch it to precipitation. Only then is the information displayed. Once it's onscreen, the precipitation graph in the Apple Weather app centers on the full day view (with the current time in the middle) rather than just the future, which is what most users care about.
That's not the same as putting it front-and-center. Yes, the information is there, but the interface design is garbage.
If rain is forecast in the next hour they put the minute by minute graph at the top front and center in the iOS weather app.
Not good enough. I'm going to be out for the whole day: do I need an umbrella? I want to know that immediately. It's such basic information that it needs to be always at hand.
The app also tells you that. For example at the top of the app now I see a message “Rainy conditions expected around 3pm”
Author here!
There's definitely a taste / opinion component to any deep design critique. I think for many (for whom the post resonated), the ability to quickly glance at Dark Sky and understand relevant weather contextually was THE game changer.
It's a hard thing to discuss, because until you've felt the experience, it doesn't seem like a "big deal".
Some apps do use text to talk about the current / upcoming rain, but showing it visually makes it even easier. The ease of use is important because weather apps aren't meant to be that interactive (like a game). They're meant to be context-sensitive information graphics that let you drop in and out very very quickly.
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#inferring_context_from_the_e...
Thank you for taking the time to write this article. I was disturbed about the shutdown of Darksky because I really loved the features of that app and reading your article took me on a nice walk down memory lane. Raising the discussion here has been not only been cathartic in that I now know I have a lot of company for my thoughts, but has also provided some alternatives to try to recapture the experience. I'm not a big fan of Apple Weather and at least now I have some options to explore.
As the author points out, text like that is inferior to embedding information in the graphic. The reason is that with text, I have to just "hope" that they've handled all the cases that I care about, and at the fidelity that is relevant to me. With a graphic, this information is always available, and combining multiple elements tells me more information than a single text snippet can. For example: "Oh, it's only going to be drizzly for like an hour, I'll be in a meeting around then anyways." That's a decision that 'rainy conditions expected around 3pm' does not help me with.
> As the author points out, text like that is inferior to embedding information in the graphic.
Apple Weather presents this information in graphical form as well. When I open the app, not only is what I need to know — "Rainy conditions expected around 7pm" — front and center, but just below that I can scroll through hours with rain percentages, and with another tap I can get as much detail as I could want.
> To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph.
To find it, you need to know that the interface is interactive the same way as other interfaces like control center are - clicking a 'tile' pops/navigates to more details.
You don't have to tap on temperature - tapping on the precipitation forecast will drill down to precipitation estimates.
Just know that Apple Weather (like Dark Sky before it) uses multiple different models, so the forecasts 15 minutes, 2 hours, and 1 day out are likely to be reasoned about entirely differently.
And even then, it's often plain wrong. A couple of weeks ago it was raining in my area at noon (a flood watch was active!) but the precipitation screen showed 0 rain that day, in the past and the future.
It is not. If you think it’s the same you never used Dark Sky.
Well, this is quite a detailed analysis and I don't want to take a dump on it because it's obviously a good analysis. BUT. Masterpiece? I don't think so. Dark Sky's data visualization was all shiny gold and not enough real science.
Their radar map with all those pretty colors was super buggy, so much so that you couldn't trust it. If you move the map or zoom in, or pan around, the rain / radar data often would not move with the map. So you would have a 2x scaling issue with how large the rain area was.
Also, they never provided confidence information. They often made predictions that were wrong, and never informed you of how confident their forecasts were. But they would always show a 'flawless' representation of the data so you would be convinced it was right.
Yes yes, it was pretty. But it was not backed by science, and the data was misrepresented I'd say 100% of the time. You can't have a masterpiece of data visualization where a major component of the vis is 'looking pretty' and the factualness of it is ignored.
It's interesting reading this comment, because this perfectly aligns with my experience using the app on Android back before Apple shut it down. I agree with all of the article's points on how intuitive and helpful the UI was, and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement. But the predictions were constantly wrong.
Meteorologists seemed to feel that Dark Sky was a graphics processing tool, not a weather app.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/dark-sky-weather-app-ap...
I’ve replaced Dark Sky with Windy but, although Windy is quite good, it doesn’t answer the same questions that Dark Sky answered quickly (and the article does a good job of pointing out these questions).
https://www.windy.com/
Dark Sky was okay. As detailed here, it does a great job of centering on the actual user needs of weather app users.
Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot.
Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’
You know, northern Californians.
It was a poor fit for people whose weather landscape includes frequent storms; snowfall; temperature ranges that go down below freezing (seriously - dark sky’s temperature graphs never marked freezing temperatures for some reason); multiple types of precipitation; etc.
Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW, where the main concerns are just how rainy it will be that day, and the approximate high temperatures coming up. Nothing accurately forecasts (here) whether it will be freezing or whether precipitation will be snow/slush/hail/rain, but other apps like Apple's are absolutely horrific at forecasting precipitation even a few hours out. Stuff like showing 30% chance of rain in 1 hour, clear the rest of the day, when it just rains the entire day and the "forecast" continually shows that it will stop raining in 30 minutes.
> Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’
> Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW
I think you're actually in complete agreement with OP
Right? ‘It’s not only for Northern California! It works fine up as far as Seattle!’ is not exactly a refutation of my (slightly hyperbolically stated) thesis that Dark Sky’s human friendliness is not as global as people seem to think.
Sure, if you translate that to "somewhere with blizzards" and ignore that it's nonsense as-is.
When does the temperature drop to freezing and negative windchill in PNW like OP mentioned were use cases not designed into the app as it is not of the target audience with areas of mild weather.
I live in the mountains in Colorado and DarkSky was by far the best UX for viewing upcoming weather. The way they presented projected hourly snowfall was especially good, as was the projected snowfall by day.
With Apple Weather, you get a snow icon and a percentage for future days. For DarkSky it was an actual projected snowfall amounts, which is so much more useful. Are we expecting 2 inches? Or 20?
On a daily basis, Dark Sky had a great graph of hourly projections. Apple Weather has a bar chart with no numbers unless you hover on each bar, and it will project 8 hours of snow in the hourly view but then the bar chart only shows a bar on one hour.
I said it was okay. Just don’t feel like it had the most incredible human-centric weather UI that is often touted for it.
When I evaluated it, my main concerns were things like ‘am I gonna have to dig the car out in the morning?’ and ‘is that thunderstorm heading right for me or just to one side?’ - and those were not things I felt Dark Sky did particularly well. The old weatherspark visualizations used to be much better, but they seem to have vanished.
Which is fine! Tools can be great for some things and not others! I just find it surprising that it is touted as having hot weather presentation ‘right’. I’m still waiting for better.
Try tapping on the icon in Apple Weather to see a graph of various elements.
I dunno, I live in Washington, DC, which has many of those properties (snow, freezing temperatures, heavy thunderstorms in the summer), and knowing which ten-minute window in the next hour was the least likely to get me soaked if I wanted to pop out for coffee was still incredibly useful, and I have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. Certainly there were some days when the weather was shit regardless and there wasn't a good opening, but no app is going to remedy that.
I lived in both Florida and Massachusetts, using DarkSky was amazing in both climates. I think your geographical bias is more telling than your app usage.
Author here -- Yeah the "accuracy" of the weather I think ultimately can be debated. I think "accuracy" could very specific to your geographic area.
Plus, Dark Sky could have switched up their data feeds or algorithms to improve this. But it's difficult to teach their design approach
I disagree. I'm a photographer in Minnesota and getting notified when rain was going to start and stop was really handy on wedding days. I also had it set to let me know if the next day was going to be windy so I could possibly postpone shoots.
Yes, rain shower timing is Dark Sky’s greatest utility.
I just found it surprising that ‘rain will turn to ice starting at 7pm’ was not also a usecase Dark Sky gave as much attention to.
It was great in the UK, although it doesn’t freeze or storm too much here either.
I live in Montreal and I loved Dark Sky. So I'll disagree.
UK here where we have all the weather all the time. I also disagree.
I used to think the UK had all the weather too. Then I moved to New England, which still doesn’t get all the weather, but compared to the UK, feels like the weather is turned up to 11.
What the UK has is changeable weather, which is, as I say, what dark sky excels at helping you with (‘will I need me brolly? Or will it blow away?’)
It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items.
The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult.
I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparable.
I feel like I lost a friend that I consulted with daily.
Can I just piggyback on this to shit on the iOS Weather app for a moment?
Whoever designed it doesn't understand the concept of daily max/min temperatures, and the daily low presented in the app is the lowest during that calendar day, rather than the forecast overnight low following the day. It drives me absolutely mad, because I can never reliably determine how cold it will get overnight without going into the hourly view (and even that could be inaccurate for fast-moving weather systems).
It's interesting you say that, because I have been under the impression that weather apps always show daily low temperatures based on the calendar day (midnight-to-midnight). I've always thought they could be improved by showing the overnight low, which you're saying is the case for some weather apps. Which ones are those?
It's also worth noting that the midnight-to-midnight scheme is a lot more well-defined than the alternative we're both advocating. What do you show as the low temperature for today if it's currently 3am and the temperature isn't going to drop until 3am tomorrow? If that temperature drop is displayed as today's low temperature, then I won't be able to discern whether it will get cold during this night (i.e. today between 1am and 7am) or the following night (i.e. between 7pm today and 7am tomorrow). Not to mention that cold systems can move in at any time, and it may be much colder at noon tomorrow than 3am tomorrow, so in many case "overnight low" isn't even what you care about.
Google's weather feature on Android does this :) They don't call it "high" and "low", instead calling it "day" and "night".
What if the low temperature is forecast to be at noon?
It's a good question, and something I was kinda wondering too. I see now it's technically written as:
> Day 58°↑ • Night 48°↓
Maybe the arrows are used to indicate the high and low?
Then you live in Antarctica, it's winter, and you're out of scope.
Definitely not. It’s common in places where the weather actually changes due to things other than the time of day, i.e. where cold systems move in. For example, look at the forecasts in the Chicago area where tomorrow (March 23) it’s going to be a fair bit colder at noon than at 1am. This is not at all uncommon, and is in fact precisely why it’s important to check the weather forecast in the morning on normal days when you’re deciding what to wear.
Okay, so Antarctica, Chicago, and Cleveland.
But the broader point is that the utility of an overnight temperature is that it happens while most people are sleeping, and thus unable to respond to it.
Fluctuations while one is awake can be coped with.
IMHO, the most reasonable intuitive measures would be: overnight low, rain during the midnight-to-midnight day
> Okay, so Antarctica, Chicago, and Cleveland.
Really anywhere where temperatures change frequently for reasons other than the time of day. Probably the vast majority of people who use temperature forecasts in consumer weather apps.
> But the broader point is that the utility of an overnight temperature is that it happens while most people are sleeping, and thus unable to respond to it.
> Fluctuations while one is awake can be coped with.
I couldn't disagree more. Surely the most common use case by far for quick checks of the daily forecast is simply to decide what to wear when you leave the house in the morning. If you're unhoused, or camping, or you work at night, or you're a gardener, then of course overnight temperature forecasts are also vital.
> Okay, so Antarctica, Chicago, and Cleveland.
And the entire state of Colorado. It is not that uncommon for our daily high to be at 12am, or for the temperature to drop 30F between a midday high and dusk as a front moves in.
These aren't conditions you can describe with just two temperature points, no matter where they are anchored.
For overnight temperatures, many people just want badging to know if there is a frost/freeze condition - e.g., is there a weather condition they need to deal with while they would otherwise be sleeping.
They did the same for the weather on the Apple Watch. It used to show the next minimum temperature but sometime last year it changed to minimum within calendar day, which is just about useless.
To be fair it's only useless 50% of the time
If it's useless 50% of the time, it's untrustworthy 100% of the time.
Companies solve their own problems. Outlook is one of the classic examples of that - it was an app that was a cultural snapshot of Microsoft.
In the case of Apple, Cupertino is a pretty boring weather locale. Sometimes you need to zipper your coat and once in awhile it rains.
In the case of Apple, Cupertino is a pretty boring weather locale. Sometimes you need to zipper your coat and once in awhile it rains.
Which also explains why iPhone headphone wires get brittle in moderately cold weather, and iPhones go into thermal shutdown mode at temperatures that are common in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the non-Bay Area parts of California.
Another example: Corporate HQs have world class internet access. No latency high bandwidth connections. If folks building lazy loading web interfaces had to use their stuff in rural North Dakota, much less outside the US, they'd be shocked at how terribly it performs and user-hostile it feels.
They get brittle in colder weather? Never heard of this, can you explain a bit more?
So true…
Piggybacking your piggyback, that graph for the temperature throughout the day looks pretty but damn terrible UX in comparison to dark sky. Hourly temperatures/rain/etc gives me everything I need at a glance without having to drag my finger to the time I am interested in.
Here's an egregious UX error in the Apple Weather app: when you look at the precipitation map, it animates the situation throughout the day, but the current time it's showing is only indicated by the cursor in a timeline at the bottom. Your location in the center in the map, where you want to look, only shows the current temperature and weather: it does not animate with the timeline and the rest of the map, and does not show the time the map is currently reflecting. So if you look at the center of the screen you have no idea what time's situation the map is showing, and if you look at the bottom you can see the time, but not the situation. You have to stop the animation, manually drag the cursor to "now", look at the storm pattern, then manually drag it an hour forward, look at the map again, etc.
I’m confused why the daily minimum would include times outside the day. That doesn’t seem like a daily minimum by definition. The way Apple does it is exactly how I assumed it would work.
Is the alternative you described standard?
It becomes useless when it was 32 degrees at midnight. But now, as I sit here on a Thursday morning, it shows the low for today as 28 degrees and tomorrow as 40 degrees. What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out? Will it be closer to 40 or continue dropping and be closer to freezing? Is it safe to put my sensitive plants back outside? Perhaps it shows 28 again but is that for early Friday morning or late Friday night?
In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn. That also happens to be the time of day when most of us are first leaving the house. That's a pretty important piece of information to have and it isn't there at a glance.
> In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn.
Probably true, and yet the counterexamples are when the temperature forecast is particularly important when I'm choosing what to wear. Any simplification of the temperature forecast into daily lows and highs will fail certain use cases, so I think it's very reasonable to make the daily lows and highs as well- and simply-defined as possible and provide an hourly forecast so that people can also check for the potential edge cases.
Why not both? Keep the normal highs and lows we expect from our weather stations and websites, then display the temperature variance in a view that doesn't require you to drill into the app view clicks / drags.
I don't see any defensible opinion to let the lows be during/before sunrise.
Given that the suns movements are pretty predictable, it seems suboptimal to define counter to something that happens almost every day.
But the most important weather changes to see forecasts for are the ones caused by weather systems moving in which are mostly independent of the time of day. Those are the ones that catch you by surprise wearing the wrong clothes.
Are they? Freeze warnings are pretty important in large parts of the country.
> What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out?
Can’t you just check Friday’s temps? I’m not sure why you’d expect this info out of Thursday.
Absolutely this, I think OP has an atypical mental model of the daily boundaries of temperature, we’ve been conditioned to think of daily highs and lows from radio and local news television forecasts. You can’t just look at the app in isolation of decades of social conditioning that predate the iPhone and weather apps.
Yep, Dark Sky's way is standard. Weather.com and the like show the next low. Today in my area is actually the perfect example, currently ~40f. It shows a high of ~55f and a low of ~53f.
Apple's weather app shows a low of ~40f.
Say it says “32F low for saturday”. Is it going to freeze friday night at 1am (aka sat morning) or sat at 11pm?
It's very rare that I need to know about what the weather was like a few hours in the past.
Then don’t look at past temps.
The daily low is the lowest temp of the day. It could very well be in the future. But it’s certainly not in the next day, and it’s not from a specific hour. If you want to see tomorrow mornings temps look at tomorrow’s hourly temps.
Do you expect the daily high to work the same? So maybe at 4pm it’s down from the daily high and now it shows today’s high is actually some temp around 3pm tomorrow?
I get what you’re saying but in no way is that a daily high. More like a next 24 hour high but even then, do you want that? That means if it’s 80F at 3pm today and 90F at 3pm tomorrow and it’s 3pm, then the high will be 90.
It’s much easier to just accurately categorize these by day/hour and let the user find what they care about instead of warping definitions to anticipate certain use cases.
How about we categorise it by the day/night cycles like we have since before we walked on 2 legs? Not some arbitrary time model we created that happens to divide the night cycle at midnight. Daytime max, overnight min.
absolutely the radio and local news television forecasts have always had daily high and low boundaries, not sure what is up with these people’s atypical mental models? They must not have listened to the news on the radio or on television growing up? Why should an app create a UI design pattern that goes against the majority of people’s mental models.
Oh, that drives me insane. It makes it absolutely useless for figuring out how to dress for outdoor activities.
Daily min/max by calendar day has never been a standard.
Weather is not divided by some arbitrary time humans created. Max and min temperatures occur overwhelmingly in their respective day and night cycle. Adding some arbitrary cut off point in the middle of those cycles just makes comprehending max/min temps unnecessarily more difficult then it needs to be.
What if we set the calendar day to change at midday, would we start reporting max temps up to 12pm, past 12pm? How useful do you think that info would be?
People are interested in the overnight minimum, not a confusing minimum that could be either early morning or just before midnight depending on the weather at the time.
Worth noting the facet you're criticizing is how Dark Sky did it.
And it wasn't just how it looked either. Dark Sky was a weather app that was actually accurate for what you wanted it for.
It really frustrates me that Apple completely killed off the product. I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.
>I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.
Shot in the dark - Apple wants you to live and die within Apple's ecosystem, using only Apple products. Doesn't matter if they own Dark Sky, it's not "Apple Weather", and that's what they want - iThis, iThat, Apple Something, Mac Whatever. Dark Sky also didn't look or feel like the rest of Apple's products, and they want consistency and are not about to redesign the rest of their software line to fit with Dark Sky's much-loved UI/UX.
Why redo everything you've done when you can just kill off this one little thing and force everyone back over to you?
Counterpoint: the Beats and Shazam brands still exist.
Counterpoint: Beats' revenue far eclipses that of Dark Sky. Apple recognized that it is its own cash-cow of a beast, and purchased them both for the revenue and because they could ensure that the product is more closely integrated with Apple products.
Shazam, I can only take a stab at this one. Perhaps it's a name thing? "Nobody", eg the public at large (so, set aside the passionate Dark Sky love you see in this thread), gives a shit about weather apps, at least on a broad scale. The default option is fine. You don't say, "Dark Sky it", you say, "Check the weather". When you wanna know what's playing, most people say, "Shazam it". Apple and Android integration of this into Siri/search came way later, far after "Shazam it" became the standard phrase. There's no "obvious" replacement, like there is with the default weather app.
Whatever model the Weather app uses has been hopelessly unreliable and at times downright incorrect. Dark Sky wasn’t always accurate (no model is), but it seemed to match reality more often than not.
> I don't know what their problem is
Here are 195 reasons why Apple bought Dark Sky: https://i.imgur.com/5dkofIG.jpg
Have you noticed how many moves they've made to make it easy to give up your location privacy to Apple? Emergency SOS is the latest one, complete with lots of submarine news articles about how OMG It Saved My Life!! This paper has many many more examples: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
they've made to make it easy to give up your location privacy to Apple? Emergency SOS is the latest one
I look forward to your blog post where you detail your phone call to emergency services:
911: 911, what's your emergency?
You: I fell down the stairs and broke my leg. It's gushing blood everywhere!
911: What is your location?
You: Oh, no you don't! I'm not giving my location to anyone! You're just gonna have to GUESS where I am!
I like how you have to make up a hypothetical story about me because you can't say I'm wrong about Apple's pattern of data collection :)
To make matters worse, Apple killed off the web version too, and didn't replace it with anything.
The Dark Sky website was brilliant as well. It loaded quickly, wasn't covered in ads, and the UX was comparable to their app.
I haven't really found anything to replace it with yet. I've defaulted to weather.gov, but the UX isn't really there yet (it's great for storms, or when you need to drill down into good data though).
>Apple killed off the web version too
It boggles the mind, doesn't it? The equivalent of a bunch of food and housing was spent just so something useful could be taken out of half of the population's hands. Just think about that, overall social utility decreased and someone spent money to make it happen. Absolutely parasitic behavior.
I've switched to Weather Underground 10-day view: https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/md/baltimore
I used the customize button to remove everything but temp, chance of rain and wind.
It's no Dark Sky, but it's something.
Pretty happy with merrysky.net.
I've gone to windy.com for weather, which really isn't what is was meant for, but on a large screen it works fine.
> It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items.
"I hate them so I will only give them a tiny bit less money" is why it will never change
I think a big problem is that there are few choices because of constant consolidation. This is reflected in two ways:
a) every big tech company tries to do a ton of stuff. I'm not happy with this weather app. Usually the market would reflect this by me buying a different weather app. However, Apple isn't in the weather app market, they are in the phone and computer market. If I buy a different weather app, Apple actually gets more money! Buying a different phone because Apple made the decision to kill my favorite weather app is now muddled in with so many other factors and Apple and their shareholders are unlikely to link a drop in phone sales to killing the weather app. Now I also need to look at the very few real competitors and probably have issues with them as well. It's a mess because they all do too much. Maybe I don't want Android devices because Google built Bart without disclosing training sources. What a mess!
b) someone builds something nice and it just gets killed by an incumbant. No real competition between most startups and incumbants. It's more like a buyer/seller relation
I'd love to see this all fixed in my utopia by prohibiting acquisitions and instead force companies to fight for customers. But I'm sure that would need to happen globally to avoid putting our own companies at a disadvantage where they'll just get their lunch stolen by companies that aren't limited like that. I'm also sure this solution has other side effects I cannot think of.
Ok, let's play this game. I don't like what Apple did to Darksky, so I'll switch to Android. What do I do when Google inevitably does something similar, who do I switch to then?
I will never get the fixation of US people to iPhones. Most android devices do the same, are cheaper, open, flexible and does about the same things.
I still haven't forgiven Apple for killing off Aperture.
To date nothing has come close to Aperture's seamless blending of image organizing, editing, and metadata enrichment. I'm not holding my breath that an app that feels like DarkSky will ever come along.
Even that notification sound when it’s going to rain.
Dark Sky was magical. It was the kind of experience Steve Jobs used to get giddy about on stage for 20 minutes at a time.
Man I wish they could just hit the undo button on axing it.
I can't delete the icon just yet.
CARROT is OK for "a different kind of weather app", but nothing really is the same.
Dark Sky's UI was just... Nice.
It was good enough that I moved from android to iPhone when they killed the android version
Agreed. Very poor decision on Apple's part. They should have just rebranded it and kept as is.
Give https://weathergraph.app a try - it ticks more or less all of the boxes in this article. Only thing missing is the radar.
Any good alternatives since?
I'm a huge fan of a few government sponsored ones:
- A great simple one is YR: https://www.yr.no/en
- if you happen to be in Switzerland: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.admin.meteo..., https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meteoswiss/id589772015
Government sponsored apps are great because there's no advertising, they aren't selling your data, and they are free. They usually pay to collect the data, run the models, and provide the API anyway. Providing the app is the cheap part.
https://www.windy.com/
Probably some of the best visualization techniques I have seen. Free features cover most use cases; premium gives you better resolution.
Windy is awesome, although a bit overkill if you just want to know if it's going to rain in your town later today.
I like Weawow. It's proven accurate regarding weather trends, but it tends to be overly dramatic. I'm guessing this is related to living in a valley, as the weather to the north and south seems to match their forecast better.
It has the data that's indispensable to me: precipitation amount per hour. I don't care as much about how likely it is to rain, I care about whether I'm going to get sprinkled on or drenched.
The wind and weather map is pretty nice.
I use Weawow, too, but it's UI is very cumbersome in terms of getting quickly to what you care about. I have Meteograms' widget on my homescreen to get precip/hr and the core metrics similar to the wunderground 10 day view, but I find it much easier to read a daily forecast presented in a more traditional manner so go from Meteogram (tactical) to Weawow (strategic) forecasts.
If you are in the USA the national weather service is great, its not flashy but good and you can read the text forecast discussion.
Otherwise
Windy.com and Meteoblue are good.
I've been using Today Weather on Android ever since Dark Sky was killed off there. It looks nice, lots of different data sources, and the $7 lifetime Premium Version is a good price.
>$7 lifetime Premium Version
I presume you mean the $7 "For as long as the developer feels like it" Premium Version.
fwiw, I paid for a lifetime sub to eHD Weather (by Elecont) ... back in 2013 and still use it. Moreover, the dev still responds to emails within a couple hours. If I can get 10 years of use out of an app for $5, that's excellent value!
https://merrysky.net/ comes pretty close!
https://helloweather.com/
My goTos are NOAA.gov and pirateweather.net
Apple also made the underlying API available for both iOS and Android. Someone is free to create a similar app.
> free to create a similar app
Only if you sign up for the Apple Developer Program, comply with all their rules and expectations, and not be surprised if they ban you from using it with no explanation whatsoever.
Yes because out of the millions of app submissions that happen every year, you are likely to “be banned” for some arbitrary reason that is not spelled out.
That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…
> That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…
Apple products are popular among consumers and developers in spite of their many user-hostile decisions precisely because there are few alternatives, all of which have substantial disadvantages as well.
So if Apple products are “user hostile” then why are enough users happily spending twice as much on iPhones and more on Macs to make Apple the most valuable company in the world?
Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
> So if Apple products are “user hostile” then why are enough users happily spending twice as much on iPhones and more on Macs
They aren't all "happy" about it, but as I mentioned in the post you replied to, there is not a decent alternative.
> Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
Certainly not but one would have to be interested in the fact of the matter to realize it.
There is an alternative - 85% of phone users choose Android.
> 85% of phone users choose Android.
Indeed, seems they are not "happy" to buy Apple.
> There is an alternative
I mentioned this twice, it is also notoriously inadequate and user-hostile as well. Do you have anything to add to the discussion?
> Indeed, seems they are not "happy" to buy Apple.
Your thesis was that Apple customers were not happy to buy Apple products…
> is also notoriously inadequate and user-hostile as well
Your second thesis was there was no decent alternative.
Well, if so many people are unhappy with both iOS and Android, I’m sure they can but something like PinePhone.
Or maybe most people don’t care about running a full open source stack on the Apple Pencil?
For one thing, from what I understand (I don't develop mobile apps, and I don't own an Apple phone) Apple forbids applications that provide features already built into the phone. That's why even Firefox on iOS is just a skin over Safari.
So if Apple Weather (or whatever they call the in-house weather app) comes with the phone, then your "same thing but different" app will not be made available in the Apple app store.
Weather is an entire category of apps on the App Store. You can develop any weather app you like.
This is also not true. There are plenty of podcast apps, weather apps, notes apps, music apps, streaming video apps. I can’t think of a single bundled app where there are not plenty of alternatives.
Dark sky was well done, i don't understand why someone else doesn't replicate it. Apple weather isn't specific enough to be valuable.
RIP
I have moved from Dark Sky to Weather Strip: https://www.weatherstrip.app
It does a really nice job of showing me most of what Dark Sky showed, in a similarly easy-to-glance-at format once I spent a little time learning to read its graphs.
I think Carrot Weather has a lot of graphs directly ripped off from Dark Sky but the constant attempts to upsell me to a subscription plan while I was playing with it really turned me off, as did the "what political alignment would you like the sweary forecast to have" switch.
I am a big fan of https://merrysky.net/ which is explicitly trying to copy/rescue from the grave the Dark Sky look.
Nice thanks for the iOS rec. I've been a big fan of FlowX (https://flowx.io/) on Android which has had a similar graph/visualization with the addition of also having a radar view.
BTW, I'm in the process of porting Flowx to Apple. It's not as complete as the Android version but it's in beta testing if you'd like to join. Just message me and I can send an invite.
Hey, me too. Once I downloaded Weather Strip I had trouble understanding how its display methodology wasn't just the standard across weather apps -- I was hit with a serious “wait, why isn't everything like this?” moment. I'd never seen another app that makes the weather so quickly grokkable.
I’m a big fan of https://weathergraph.app since the Pebble days. It’s the same concept, but if I’m honest better designed than Weather Strip.
Thank you, I love it. Weather Underground has something similar, but this has the potential to get a lot better.
I use the National Weather Service and added a shortcut to my home screen.
what's the page you are using to replicate dark sky's capabilities exactly?
forecast.weather.gov
This looks like a nice option, but no android app
Related, the Dark Sky website and API began returning 503s earlier today, despite the Dark Sky Blog (the only thing still up) prominently displaying:
> The Dark Sky API and website will continue to function until March 31st, 2023.
Dark Sky was great, and I agree w other commenters about the shortcomings of the default iOS Weather app.
That said, if you're interested in terrific weather info and dataviz, I heartily recommend Windy.app.
Brilliant article, but I'm surprised notifications don't get a mention, this was the killer feature of Dark Sky for me - notifications warning me of imminent rain / storm / snow and notifications telling me when it's going to stop and for how long. Made living with a dog that hates rain much easier. None of this has been brought over to the stock weather app properly, that notifies me of maybe one in every hundred rainfalls which is completely useless.
My go to weather site is: https://kachelmannwetter.com/ Run by a former weatherman it uses a number of forecast models and even lets you see whether a gust of air from a specific region is going to reach you (interesting if you live in Europe and a Ukranian NPP blows up)
Related: Weather apps could in general be better, not just in terms of visualization. One thing which always annoys me is how they handle rain predictions. They give "probabilities" for rain. But what do those mean? The probability that it rains for at least one minute in the given time frame? And with at least x mm/inches of rain coming down? And isn't a low probability of short and weak rain totally different from a equally low probability of strong or long rain?
But there is a perfectly elegant alternative: Just use the expected amount of rainfall. The epected value combines both amount and probability of rainfall in one single number, without being highly arbitrary like other approaches, such as the usual reporting of plain "probabilities" with unclear interpretation.
(Of course one could add to the expected rainfall amount also the variance, to distinguish more certain predictions from more uncertain ones, though this information might often not even be that important.)
Expected value is already what most forecasts show. Expected value conveys information poorly in some common cases, like thunderstorms in the summer. It is very different to hear there's a 20% chance of a thunderstorm, dropping an inch of rain, vs. a 100% chance of .2" rain - the former needs a backup plan to deal with rain, the latter needs to plan for rain. Hence I prefer the text forecasts from the NWS, which list an amount possible, plus more in thunderstorms, rather than a bare number.
Meanwhile the 'probability' listed in forecasts is also well defined as an expected value - it's (probability of X% rain coverage) * (X %), over all X. (Rain is defined as > .01")
Okay, in very high variance cases like thunderstorms the expected value might indeed not be enough, but there are usually additional storm warnings for that anyway. My claim is just that the expected amount of rainfall is much more interesting than the probability of rainfall. Yet the apps I know display probabilities prominently, not expected values.
I tend to use probability more for decision making - usually trying to determine whether I need to bring an umbrella or rain gear with me on a given day. If the probability is low I can usually just look out the window and time my trips outside when it’s not raining and probably get by without rain gear. Whereas a high probability means I’m probably going to need to go out in the rain at some point, and need to pack appropriately.
I also do a lot of cycling, and total duration spent in the rain tends to matter more to me than the amount of rainfall. I don’t mind riding through a quick downpour or two on a ride if I can dry out in between, but spending several hours in constant rain can be miserable (and hypothermia becomes a concern) - even if it’s light rain.
Of course expected amount definitely has uses, too. For example if there is rain forecast for tonight, and I’m trying to determine the probability that a field will be usable for practice in the morning.
Anyway I would say that both probability and expected amount are important, and any competent weather app should offer both. The Apple Weather app only shows hourly forecasts for expected amount, and that alone would be enough to be a dealbreaker for me.
Not a meteorologist, just a computer science guy that read a couple of papers.
My understanding is that the probabilities in weather forecasts aren't a probability at all, but rather a coverage measure. Local weather models are computed in discrete grid coordinates of say 10km. Every grid cell of 10km^2 has a single set of computed forecast data. The percentage is a measure of how much of that area received rain in the timeframe, not of probability of rain, but of coverage of rain.
Author here -- I wholeheartedly agree. I recommend reading up on some of the research in uncertainty visualization. There's a good example of visualizing the probability that a bus will arrive in the next X minutes that feels similar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1kSnWvqCw0
Relatedly, I'm fasinated by how much human judgement goes into those numbers. A meteorologist with local expertise looks at a few different models, decides which are more likely to be accurate, and then fills out a grid.
Just to hop on this, the standard is counter intuitive for rain probability. I'm annoyed, but also fascinated by how much it "makes sense" when I have read about it, but it also "makes no sense" when I just want to know: should I get my jacket? :)
Loose definition (with errors and assumptions, but helps some without getting into actual probability math):
If it says "30%" - many of us have heard "30% chance of showers". It is NOT "30% chance of showers"; it actually is "100% percent chance of rain, over 30% of the area, within a given time, of a particular amount of rain."
Which is STILL (to me), difficult for the average person to comprehend.
Copying and pasting from Weather.com (linked PDF - https://www.weather.gov/media/pah/WeatherEducation/pop.pdf)
PRECIPITATION PROBABILITY The probability of precipitation forecast is one of the most least understood elements of the weather forecast. The probability of precipitation has the following features: ..... The likelihood of occurrence of precipitation is stated as a percentage ..... A measurable amount is defined as 0.01" (one hundredth of an inch) or more (usually produces enough runoff for puddles to form) ..... The measurement is of liquid precipitation or the water equivalent of frozen precipitation ..... The probability is for a specified time period (i.e., today, this afternoon, tonight, Thursday) ..... The probability forecast is for any given point in the forecast area To summarize, the probability of precipitation is simply a statistical probability of 0.01" inch of more of precipitation at a given area in the given forecast area in the time period specified. Using a 40% probability of rain as an example, it does not mean (1) that 40% of the area will be covered by precipitation at given time in the given forecast area or (2) that you will be seeing precipitation 40% of the time in the given forecast area for the given forecast time period. Let's look at an example of what the probability does mean. If a forecast for a given county says that there is a 40% chance of rain this afternoon, then there is a 40% chance of rain at any point in the county from noon to 6 p.m. local time. This point probability of precipitation is predetermined and arrived at by the forecaster by multiplying two factors: Forecaster certainty that precipitation will form or move into the area X Areal coverage of precipitation that is expected (and then moving the decimal point two places to the left) Using this, here are two examples giving the same statistical result: (1) If the forecaster was 80% certain that rain would develop but only expected to cover 50% of the forecast area, then the forecast would read "a 40% chance of rain" for any given location. (2) If the forecaster expected a widespread area of precipitation with 100% coverage to approach, but he/she was only 40% certain that it would reach the forecast area, this would, as well, result in a "40% chance of rain" at any given location in the forecast area.
Yeah that definition makes sense. It's indeed the probability you would get at least 0.01" of rain if we assume you are equally likely to be located anywhere in the forecast area.
But for deciding for "getting your jacket", the expected amount of rainfall seems much more relevant. Basically, you don't need a jacket if the rainfall is very unlikely, or weak, or short. In all those cases the expected amount will be low.
I really miss Dark Sky, but MyRadar has been pretty good to me in its stead.
The explanation of the flaw (if there is one) in the temperature display doesn’t make sense. Both apps are scaling the temperature bars in the same way. The Weather app is just putting a dark background behind the “pills” and left/right aligning the numbers. The pills/bars themselves are the same on both.
I would just like an app that has a functional precipitation map view. Both Dark Sky and the iOS Weather app have been horribly unreliable. Sometimes I can zoom in/out and it will/would work but it's amazing how often it doesn't.
The Apple app has been even worse than Dark Sky was at this.
I'm a big fan of Weather Underground's 10 day forecast graph. Like Dark Sky, you can see the temperature ebb and flow, plus wind speeds, cloud cover, rain percentages (and amounts). One chart tells me every aspect of the weather that I need.
Instead of an app, I just have a bookmark on my home screen.
Weather underground's 10 day forecast, especially the expected precipitation graph is FANTASTIC! I've found it to be very reliable for predicting real rainfall amounts for planning outdoor activities.
Too bad they don't show it on mobile though!
Does anyone have a recommendation for something similar? The usability of the WU app is pretty awful.
Meh. Dark sky visualization design was nothing special. The pinnacle of beautiful, compact, data rich weather apps remains Weather Underground back in its day before it got bought up and shredded. Now there was an weather app that could show you a week’s worth of weather at a glance.
When I used to use dark sky the radar map was awful. Most frames seemed to be empty data and the animations were very jerky. At first I thought it was a temporary issue but it never got fixed even after many years of use. Did anyone else notice that?
Yes, and I've noticed that Apple's Weather app is *even worse* on that front. The regional radar views rarely load for me.
I think it was even HN that put me onto https://merrysky.net/ but it's definitely a good attempt at carrying on the legacy
Another Dark Sky thread, another opportunity to ask the community if anyone knows about Apple doing research with the barometers in their phones. Dark Sky claimed they 'did' but they never expanded on what that meant for them. Did they actually use the barometer data collected from the app? Or did it just get sent to /dev/null as I suspect?
And if Apple bought that code, did they use it themselves? Is Apple doing anything to improve weather forecast accuracy in the main weather models by running data assimilation on cleaned barometer data?
If not it is such a wasted opportunity that I just get so angry about. If so....please tell us more.
I suspect barometer data from phones would be junk unless you can correlate it with other data. The phone’s barometer is sensitive enough to detect the pressure difference (altitude change) of a few cm. That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather.
Yes, but, significant work was done at an academic level between 2011 and 2017, researchers at universities, grad student projects, etc, that resulted in usable data being extracted. I worked on this problem for ~10 years off and on. It is absolutely doable.
Especially since you don't actually _need_ raw pressure data to be useful. Pressure rate of change over time is still useful and produces improved accuracy in some local forecasts.
But not only that, the researchers at UW under Cliff Mass found that you can do on-device ML to clean the quality of the data, remove errors, and live-adjust to MSLP on-device, without even needing the dense network of sensors nearby for error correction.
It's 100% doable, but it just takes some hard science and effort.
> That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather
Yes, but, the noise problem was solved half a decade ago.
Huh. This is why I love HN. I didn’t know about that but looking up these papers to see if this approach would be useful to some other stuff I’m working on with similar-ish noise problems that conventional algorithms aren’t working for.
Best of luck! Here's one paper I referenced for a starting point, may be the most useful one (not sure..been a while..) https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/35/3/jtech-d...
Not really?
A 10cm change in elevation at sea level results in a 0.0001% change in atmospheric pressure [0]. On the other hand, weather-relevant pressure changes operate on scales of ~0.1% [1]. By my math, a small weather-relevant pressure change would be equivalent of someone changing their elevation by 100 meters.
Additionally, on a modern phone the barometric data can be adjusted against the accelerometer and GPS to mitigate changes in elevation (especially relative to, as you say, a slow-moving measurement).
[0] https://www.mide.com/air-pressure-at-altitude-calculator [1] https://barometricpressure.app/content/understanding-high-lo...
Why say "not really" when you can simply test this yourself with a sensor dumping app. Planes have been using this technology for about a hundred years with accuracy down to the foot.
It isn't the GPS or position of the device you need to correlate, its trustworthy data. Is the device on an elevator, or did the pressure actually drop?
Shout out to FlowX on Android. ( https://flowx.io/ )
The best weather app I've ever used.
Much thanks to the founder Duane & his partner for the ongoing development
Not to be sceptical, but here's my initial impression. Try the "privacy" link at the bottom of their homepage.
https://flowx.io/privacy/
> Page not found (404) > Request Method: GET > Request URL: http://flowx.io/privacy/ > Raised by: wagtail.core.views.serve
> You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.
They tout excellent app UX but the website has a lot of rough edges visually.
Again, not discounting their work. I'm still going to install and try out, but initial impressions matter.
Flowx dev here. I'm not sure if the 404 page or the Debug = True is the concern?? but there are two privacy pages in the help section: https://flowx.io/help/privacy/ https://flowx.io/help/privacy-policy/
I'm not a fan of website - they have become complex. I'm currently looking into static pages as a replacement.
That said, Flowx has many moving parts: app development, data servers, data processing, support, forum, website, and others. My main focus is app development and probably the least focus is the website.
Good eye! I added this to their bugs forum.
I believe they are still a team of one, and have focused on app progress and efficiency at the expense of bugs & loose ends that would typically be handled in a larger organization with dedicated teams for that sort of thing. I bet they would
Personally I find it charming. That is until I run into a security issue.
I can't speak for Flowx though.
I've actually already looked into the DEBUG=True issue just now. Setting it to false causes an "Internal Server Issue".
So do I spend hours looking for a fix, look into replacing it with a static pages site (I'm thinking Hugo) or just go back to porting Flowx to Apple :-)
> Never deploy a site into production with DEBUG turned on.
- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/settings/#debug
Setting DEBUG = False doesn't cause in Internal Server Issue. The issue is caused by something else, having DEBUG = True just means Django will return a detailed error page, instead of a generic 500 error page.
IIRC, DEBUG = True also used to leak memory, which doesn't matter so much for local development, where it's intended to be used.
I changed DEBUG = False and I get an "Internal Server Error" - you can check it now while I have a quick go at finding the cause.
I want to try static page generators (Hugo) instead since they are easier to maintain. So it's a prioritization question - do I spend time fixing this bug or spend the time on migrating.
Thank you for the prompt reply!
imho, static pages site is the best way to simplify. My personal favorite is hexo.io, but ultimately pick anything that gets the job done.
I have switched to "windy.com" (not the confusingly similarly-named windy.app), not because it has an amazing UI, but because it's one of the few weather apps that lets me see the output of the forecasting models directly. Emphasis on the "s", it supports multiple models and you can switch between them. In the USA, the "HRRR" model is freakishly accurate over the next 72 hours.
Everyone talks about UI, but you can have the most amazing UI in the world and it would be useless if it was presenting you with bad data.
It has some similarity to the weather overview graphs from weather.gov which are my daily driver.
Its just stacked graphs of temperature, humidity, wind, and precipitations for 2 days. Shows sunrise/sunset. Its so not pretty, but quite effective.
It took a few days, but I got quite good at reading the weather from these graphs at a glance.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3761&lon=-7...
> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands.
While this is true on the multi-day range for sure, what really made Dark Sky magical was its to-the-minute prediction of rain.
If Dark Sky said "rain in 22 minutes", you had 18-26 minutes to walk a dog before getting wet.
No other weather app has ever come close to that.
I'm not sure I completely see the authors point about "Preserving temperature magnitudes in ranges", could someone help me understand?
Specifically, I don't understand this: "all temperature ranges are rescaled to take up the same amount of space in the app.", since it seems like both the Dark Sky and Weather.app views use pills that don't cover the x axis, as expected.
Author here!
I think this image does the best job of showcasing the difference: https://i0.wp.com/nightingaledvs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...
In Apple Watch, the min and max values (the numeric values left / right of the pills) are all aligned vertically on top of each other. In Dark Sky, they aren't aligned because the horizontal position is driven by the min and max values themselves. This is subtle but CRUCIAL for information graphics / software, where "glance-ability" is so so important.
Wait, where is the Apple Watch in this? You mean iOS?
In both screenshots of that image, the horizontal position of the pills are driven by the temperature. I don't see the difference other than where the min/max label is placed.
Sorry I meant the Apple Weather app*
I have not found a replacement for the 1 week precipitation map on any of the usually suggested apps.
Has anyone else found this feature elsewhere?
I find it quite frustrating that I can't look at what the temp was a few hours ago in apple weather, really liked dark sky
Does anyone know why apple acquired them just to shut it down?
It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design.
To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened
The weather data actually was pretty unique in that a lot of the rain / snow predictions were based on visually analysing the satellite imagery. I'd understand buying it just for that reason, but to then seemingly leave that out of the stock weather app seems bizarre. (I'm guessing they haven't ported that to the stock app as the stock app is dreadful at predicting imminent rain)
Did Apple include the local weather prediction in their app? That was the other impressive part of Dark Sky. The combination of prediction and design was why Dark Sky was so good.
I use Android and never used the nice app, but used the predictions in other apps. Knowing when it was going to rain was really handy. Apps now their own predictions but not as good.
The Dark Sky API was very popular, and at the time many weather apps on iOS did sketchy things with people's data. I sensed that Apple maybe wanted to provide a free weather API for weather apps to make it easier for anyone to make a weather app.
I ended up combining multiple forecast providers in a single chart and can't use (and don't need to) anything else. There were some good apps but most don't really help orientation within the chart or maintaining the chart scale.
https://weatherian.com/
I really liked Dark Sky for the notifications and rain intensity charts. But for me in the central UK the map _never_ worked properly for me. Only fragments of the map would load, for some of the time range, and the extrapolation parts never worked properly.
Unfortunately the new apple weather version seems to have inherited exactly the same map flaws.
I can't help but remember back when they got purchased and we Android users lamented that we were losing it and Apple was going to ruin it, and many of the responses were "Haha, you should've bought an iPhone, Dark Sky is going to be great with Apple's financial support!"
Similarly, IBM bought Weather Underground, deprecated both Storm and Wunderstation apps with excellent visualizations, and then never bothered to release anything that was worth using.
I keep Storm on an iPhone and look at it every so often, even though it no longer retrieves weather data.
I went so far as to buy the Carrot premium version which allows you to get pretty close to the DS app with some settings. I don't mind paying for good design. The Apple weather app is laughingly antithetical to usual Apple design standards. Somewhere, Steve is not amused.
Anyone else notice how inaccurate the iOS weather app has gotten in iOS 16? It used to be very accurate in terms of rain/snow in California, but recently it's just completely wrong. I end up going to weather.com to get an accurate report.
Down in Melbourne, Australia it’s regularly 5-10 degrees wrong.
It’s like they got a 7 day forecast, and never updated it.
Something must have happened this year, because it used to be very accurate.
Now, if if you want accurate weather (down under) you need to use the pretty good BOM app. But, it doesn’t have a Home Screen widget, or watch complications.
Luckily It was surpassed by merrysky. The integration with rainviewer does It for me.
Dark Sky was fine and all, but in my view it didn't even come close to the elegant perfection of their precusor forecast.io's secret-for-no-good-reason and then canceled-for-no-good-reason /lines interface.
The closing of Dark Sky was a tremendous loss. We went from having minute-accurate weather forecasts to having daily forecasts like the ones from a century ago. It was devastating.
The UI always kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Elements of it were neat, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. The real reason it succeeded was a lack of advertisements tbh.
The article makes it sound like Apple just used Dark Sky as a backend and threw everything else away.
In fact it seems that they inspired heavily from Dark Sky's UI as well. In my opinion iOS now has a very clever and polished Weather app that contains many of the features mentioned in the article.
Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/GYP3ym8
You’re correct. I used Dark Sky for years and switched to the default iOS app when Apple bought Dark Sky and added all of the functionality to Weather.
I did prefer the design of Dark Sky, since the data was larger and more visually separate from the background, allowing it to be more readable at a glance. But I found that after the big update they had essentially the same functionality and the same UI.
It is not the same UI
It might be functionally the same e.g. It only shows conditions for the next 5 hours - not all day - how can you tell if you need a raincopat if you go ot. I am on an iPhone in portrait mode. DarkSky showed this as a column of data Weather as a row. This is fundamental to the whole UI.
Author here -- Apple was definitely inspired by Dark Sky but IMO it's hard to argue that it's a replacement.
If you compare the # of clicks it takes and the amount of time it takes to interpret information for the same task for Dark Sky vs the Apple Weather app, it becomes clear that the Apple Weather app "isn't quite there yet". But I hope it will be soon!
If your needs are straightforward, then the Weather app is a pretty good replacement.
I would love to see screenshots of the first iteration of dark sky- for old times sake.
Apple has well & truly forsaken us.
I always found it confusing, even after years of using it. I guess I was doing it wrong.
Related - all the way back to a Show HN in 2011 (and see also https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=thegrossman):
Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972839 - Feb 2023 (71 comments)
Apple blundered when it killed off Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34663534 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)
Apple finally killed off the beloved Dark Sky weather app today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34207668 - Jan 2023 (7 comments)
Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198207 - Dec 2022 (62 comments)
DarkSky: The World’s Best Terrible Weather App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34178827 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191 - Dec 2022 (15 comments)
Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142868 - Dec 2022 (24 comments)
Dark Sky Removed from iOS App Store Ahead of Upcoming Shutdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893850 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
Ask HN: Dark Sky EOL, Which weather app do you like? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33153663 - Oct 2022 (5 comments)
Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32817555 - Sept 2022 (301 comments)
Dark Sky EOL: 1/1/2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32816725 - Sept 2022 (2 comments)
In wake of Apple acquisition, Dark Sky ends Android support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049906 - Aug 2020 (21 comments)
Ask HN: Best Dark Sky Replacement for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24030412 - Aug 2020 (5 comments)
Ask HN: Dark Sky is gone. How can it be rebuild sustainably? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24023151 - Aug 2020 (5 comments)
Dark Sky Joins Apple - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753192 - April 2020 (2 comments)
Apple acquires Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739839 - March 2020 (576 comments)
Dark Sky App is finally available on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684938 - May 2016 (1 comment)
Dark Sky has a new owner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875478 - Jan 2015 (55 comments)
Forecast – Worldwide Weather Forecasts From the Makers of Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446134 - March 2013 (45 comments)
Dark Sky Version 2.0 (with sales figures) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382638 - Aug 2012 (1 comment)
We just launched an API for down-to-the-minute rain predictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009349 - May 2012 (1 comment)
Dark Sky - Weather Prediction, Reinvented - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186978 - Nov 2011 (79 comments)
Show HN: Dark Sky, reinvented Weather Prediction and Radar Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3163426 - Oct 2011 (2 comments)
Probably internal political maneuvering by the iOS weather app team
What are the best Dark Sky clones out there? Ideally open source.
Forecaster for Android shares some good ideas with this
By far the best weather app.
Oh, great, yet another UI masterpiece swallowed by the insatiable maw of refinement culture at Apple. "Dark Sky" app was only a weather app, but it looked goth. It was our weather app, and it was beautiful in its simplicity. Now we're left with the soulless husk that is Apple Weather. But hey, why not? Let's strip away every last shred of uniqueness and character in the name of "refinement." Sigh. Guess I'll just go back to waiting for my bones to ache for my forecasts.
Can you please not fulminate on HN? You may not owe big-corporate app-suppressers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it—we're trying for something else here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My wife often asks me "but why would you care about the weather?" and I have to say that over the years I've either been ground down or simply come to understand her way of thinking. Yes it's sort of exciting to see graphs and charts and maps and stuff, but really - do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No. Do I need an alert to tell me it's going to rain soon? No.
So, yeh, Dark Sky was beautiful but I'm not sure (for me anyway) a weather app is the necessity that many people claim it is.
Do you do anything outdoors? Sports? Hike? Drive? Own a home that is affected by storm systems? Commute on transit systems that are affected by the changing weather?
All of that, apart from the transit system thing - we don't have a lot of infrastructure where I live :-)
But - am I affected by the weather? Nope.
> do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No.
Do you not ever go outside? I can't imagine not caring about the forecast, I make decisions based on it every single day.
Sure. All the time - I'm a runner, a walker, I have teen kids who like walking, we have a dog. But is any of this really changed by knowing it's going to rain? Nope. I stick my nose out on a morning - if it's cold, I put on a warm coat. If it's going to rain, I put on something rainproof. No need for an app. Or, sadly, a chart or a graph...
How do you know if it's going to rain? And how do you know what the temperature will be midday based on how it feels in the morning? I'm honestly just curious, these things are very variable in all the places I've lived. The presence or absence of clouds is not a great predictor of rain, and depending on the day it might be 20 degrees warmer in the afternoon or 0 degrees warmer.
Obviously I can imagine living without a weather app, but I genuinely can't imagine having one but not finding it useful. One of the things people loved about Dark Sky was not just knowing whether it is or isn't going to rain, but that it's going to rain in precisely 35 minutes, I have time to bike to the store instead of driving. I used this a lot and it was very accurate.
I guess I'm fairly relaxed about it - I mean, I can tell if it's going to rain imminently because it ...feels like it.
Don't get me wrong, I did love DS and the accuracy was insane - it's just that my wife pointed out that I probably don't actually need to know this stuff. As she would say - "does it really matter?" - I mean, if I get wet, so what? I think over time I've come to agree with her :-)
I think it depends a lot on where you live. Some places have predictable weather (rainy all day, or sunny in the afternoons, or whatever) but other places see random storms with no rhyme or reason.
In those latter markets, something that tells you it’s about to rain is super useful.
Indeed. When I lived in CA, I probably checked the weather twice a year. Now that I live in TX, I check the weather daily and often multiple times a day! It was a surprising, but obvious, change after living most of my life without seasons and dramatic weather events.
I live in the UK. In Cornwall. By the sea. So there's nothing whatsoever predictable about the weather round here :-)
I get you, but I'm a sailor and a race-committee co-chair. Weather is a good chunk of my life!