* Adopt a colour scheme with similarity to the old BOM?
* Some way to store longer baseline movie animations in local state so people can avoid cost in you but run the weather radar for longer?
* Tide info? Hyper specific to people who do water things. Willyweather does this really well.
I use Willyweather and Windy. I used to use a weather app written by some mob called "shifty jelly" and their git logs were .. hysterical. Drunk fairy penguins seemed to cause most of the bugs.
Dataviz suggestions from top of the page to the bottom:
- Location search & display: no English version, only localized names, which is hard to reason if you don't know native language.
- Summary: a) what does precip. in % mean and how it correlates with cm? b) pressure is only displayed in hPa, while some countries prefer mmHg; c) what does ozone index mean and why is it important?
- Next 24 hours: visual indication for temp variation through the day would be easier to reason than just by looking at numbers (as discussed in TFA).
- Next 7 days:
a) unnecessary precision for y-axis (e.g. 10.9°C vs. 11°C);
b) band overshoot actual values (e.g. if I see 10..−10°C, I assume that would be max/min temp, but in fact it is 8..−9°C, which is impossible to tell without hovering mouse over);
c) no horiz. line through 0°C;
d) no horiz. lines through y-axis ticks, which makes it harder to reason about values closer to the end of the graph;
e) precip. in cm tells little, especially when band is alike (0.00..0.80 cm) - peaks on graphs look like a lot, in fact they are not? g) seeing blue precip. graph subconsciously means 'rain' to me, while in fact it would be snow;
f) labels for y-axis are at the same time very small, rotated 90° and also take too much horizontal space from the graph.
- Map: moving mouse over next 7 days graph causes time shown on map to change that would make sense if map's timeline would cover all 7 days, but it only covers small part of today.
- Week:
a) fog icons look like they have solid white square background, which seems to be off compared to other icons;
b) low/high values are hard to reason about, especially when it says 'Low … at 11am' and there is no tick labeled '11am' (10am .. 12pm) - displaying a line through coldest/warmest hours with °C value next to it would be much easier to understand.
Also: displaying air quality prediction based on last year's AQ would be helpful.
Could you tell me the significance of the location in Australia that's used by default? I frequently clear browser cookies and history so it often jumps back there, so I see that location a lot, but can never envision exactly why it was the default. (Specifically, a point along Gol Gol Road in Arumpo, NSW, Australia.)
This is neat, but I find the charts extremely hard to parse due to the color gradients and the similar shades, especially of blue and teal. I find the Merry Sky charts a lot easier to understand.
Thanks for the feedback. You helped make my app more readable (I went a little overboard on the gradients; I thought the gradients would help convey the sky condition):
- Also added shadow/glow to plot lines so they "pop out" more.
I'm not sure which parts you think are blue and teal. Open to suggestions for better colors! (There are only so many colors, and I like keeping the precipitation related colors all bluish.)
You mean you prefer C over F? Tapping any temperature will toggle between the two. (This always comes up, so the app should probably default to units based on the user's location: the default is F only if the app detects you're in the US)
- Toggling C/F also toggles the scale on the radar to km. Eventually, I will get around to adding a dedicated settings page.
- However, the app was designed so one could get a sense of the weather without numeric labels: temperature is a very relative experience, so use the spatial/color cues to compare yesterday, today, and forecast days.
- Notice now much more space C needs when toggling between C and F. F's 0 to 99 range fits the natural range of temperatures humans experience (weather, body temperature). Humans just don't experience anything beyond 50 degrees C. At the same time, a single delta C is too large for the precision human bodies can detect. (Humans need something closer to 0.5C precision, which is what 1 degree F is.)
- As as result C needs nearly twice as much horizontal space compared to F: due to going negative more often and needing an extra decimal for minimal precision required.
I'd sneak in 'Toggle C/F' somewhere and hook it to the same function you use on the numbers.
Fahrenheit goes negative at a measly -18C. Where I live -20 to -30C is not uncommon. Whether it's 17.5 or 18C typically does not matter, continual changes in wind and other factors will for pretty much all practical purposes quench that difference.
As a windsurfer, wingfoiler, and kitesurfer i can only say that both Windy.app a nd Windy.com are awesome. Like the ability to compare different models easily.
Dark Sky was a marvel, and when it first came out, its ability to say rain will start where you are in 2-3 minutes was a marvel.
The information design argument is 100% valid, but I also marvel that, having bought the company, Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate. I don't know whether Apple's privacy focus prevents them making the same precise predictions, or if there is some other reason they don't, but it's sad that in 2025 we don't have the same level of performance as we did twelve years ago.
> Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate
Is it not? The rainfall-per-minute over the next hour on iOS seems about the same accuracy as Dark Sky had -- I used Dark Sky for years. It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough, same as iOS did after. You can even scrub the precipitation map predictions and they look the same to me.
I know the Dark Sky prediction accuracy was greatly dependent on where you lived -- this is something that was widely discussed back in the day. If you've seen a drop in accuracy, did you simply move?
I used the Dark Sky app since it came out in 2012. I used to consistently get notifications about precipitation with Dark Sky, that were consistently accurate. The Apple weather application seems less motivated to send me notifications with any sort of regularity. I almost never get them now, even with fresh iOS installs. I haven't moved either.
And just anecdotally, Dark Sky was a delight to use. Apple Maps makes it a chore to extract the same utility from their app.
OK, notifications aren't the same as accuracy though. Neither is delight. I'm just talking about the supposed drop in accuracy that I just don't see.
(And Apple notifications are a mess generally. I constantly have notifications for something yesterday only show up today. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Weather specifically, their whole notification priority system is borked.)
I think the point was (and i'm certain my experience is) that with Apple Weather you just don't get the notifications at all (or rarely do) so it's very hard to get a feeling as to how accurate they are.
Yes, this is what I meant. I don't know what the notification thresholds are, so I use the fact that I'm getting a notification at all as a proxy for accuracy.
Got it. Yeah, where I am it's usually pretty obvious that it's probably going to rain in the next hour or two, so I look at the chart to see exactly when. I don't rely on notifications. So for me the accuracy seems the same. But if you're basing it on notifications then I could totally see why you could have a different impression.
I think -- and I might be wrong, since this is from over a decade ago -- that when I first used Dark Sky, I ended up disabling notifications because it would constantly warn me of precipitation, but then when I checked the graph there was none because the model had since updated, and I wound up turning them off. So notification thresholds are probably something hard to get right, and what is appropriate for one geographic area might not be optimal for another.
Back then (2010-2013ish) I was driving a motorcycle primarily so I was hyper aware of the immediate weather and Dark Sky was like magic in that use case.
Lived in the same general area (just outside a major metropolitan area) where I use DarkSky and now Apple Weather app.
DarkSky has better data vis and more reliable prediction. Apple Weather consistently over predicts snow fall amounts and many times I’ve had to use the Feedback to correct it on current conditions (e.g. raining when it says no rain or vice versa). I believe DarkSky had the same feedback feature but I never needed it this much.
Most of the time AW is fine but it’s less good to the point I’ve considered alternatives.
I haven't done the stats, so I should probably have said "Apple's weather app still doesn't seem as precise or accurate"
That said, I'd still bet a dollar (that to be fair, I might lose) that Apple today is less accurate, and if they're just as accurate twelve years on, that's a fail as well.
Haven't moved for years, but yeah same over here. Darksky data seemed perfect and now no matter what source of data I use in places like Carrot or the ios weather app gives me the accuracy Darksky had. Is it just climate change? I have no idea, but I agree, accuracy seems lost now without Darksky proper.
checkout forecastadvisor.com and see what's the best for your area.
I've sort of transitioned to using Ventusky and Windy to checkout the big picture stuff, then I make up my own mind about precipitation. I live in the PNW of the US and our terrain is so varied that forecasting services are kind of meh in general. They're decent for "it might rain for a while today" but anything hyperlocal tends to get bad because of the terrain in Oregon.
Probably depends on where you are, but here in Europe I always joke that you should prepare for the exact opposite of what apple weather tells you. A lot of times I’m literary standing in the rain and Apple tells me the chance for rain is 0%
Right, but Dark Sky had that issue too. When precipitation has hyperlocal variation, you're always going to have that problem.
The Doppler radar that "live" precipitation comes from takes 4-6 min to complete a scan, and then obviously it takes a few minutes for that all to be ingested, update models, and push to devices.
The "live" weather from Apple (and when it was Dark Sky) has always been a prediction from about 10 min ago. And if it's raining where you are but dry six blocks to the north (as happens all the time), it's understandable why it gets it wrong.
Dark Sky almost always over predicted rain for my area. I think that was kind of their strategy. That said, I very much miss Dark Sky on android.
Also I really like a tool called Forecast Advisor. https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ . It shows you the accuracy of various forecasting services for your area.
I use it whenever I travel. I don't stick with one forecast site because depending on the terrain/location their accuracy changes drastically.
Certain models are better for certain geographical features depending on the location. I tend to hangout around a lot of mountains and the difference in forecast models makes a huge difference.
That is basically my impression here in the US PNW. If it tells me rain is about to start at my location, the one thing I know with 100% certainty is that rain is not about to start any time soon.
Yes! The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical, right out of Back to the Future 2. I used this countless times.
So much of weather forecasting, at that time, was about trends and probabilities. DarkSky was about events, certainty, and action.
It was truly ahead of anything else and forced a new standard.
I agree. One of the weird things is that the precipitation map will show rain coming that doesn't show anywhere else in the Weather app. Nearly every time that happens, the map is the one that's correct. And usually forecast.weather.gov will align with the map as well (and provide a better forecast than the app).
But that's the point. The map is based on the Dark Sky algorithm and only goes out an hour or so. And that's where the next-hour precipitation graph comes from -- and I've never seen them not match. Everything else is standard weather forecasts. Dark Sky itself worked the same way. It wasn't making 6-hour forecasts using its 1-hour algorithm. The results would have been terrible.
This is why I don't understand the complaints that iOS precipitation accuracy is worse than Dark Sky's. The map works the same way. The chart works the same way. Complaints about UX I get. But not the complaints about a supposed fall in precipitation accuracy.
I get that it's a common trope that products always supposedly get worse once they're bought. But in this case, in terms of accuracy, I just don't think it's true. And remember, Apple would have zero reason to worsen the quality. The whole point of buying it was to improve iOS weather. Which it did.
to each their own, but i used darksky for years as a daily bicycle commuter and found it to be profoundly accurate--to the point where i could use it to find clear patches of 15-20min to ride home in. there was a marked decline in the reliability & accuracy of the information provided to me once i was forced to switch to apple weather
I dunno. I literally use Apple Weather for that (can I run an errand in the next 25 min before the rain comes back) and it works the same as it did with Dark Sky. No decline that I've noticed. Like, it doesn't suddenly start raining after only 10 min when the app said I'd have 25 min.
Agreed, that’s what won me over to Dark Sky. Now I use Carrot Weather and like that a lot, the “it’s going to rain hard in XX minutes” notifications are awesome, especially with a dog. I’ve gotten that notification close to a normal time I’d take the dog out and been able to run him outside before it pours rain for the next hour.
Kind of feel like watching Spiderman tonight and I don't know why hehe.
In all seriousness I heard some good things of dark sky. My current weather app is windy.com and I believe it's more built for surfers and such (??) - not sure what the best android weather app is.
The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time, though it’s still not a perfect replacement.
Scrolling through the Dark Sky screenshots, I can recognize many of the same things now incorporated with Apple’s. And Apple does offer location specific notifications of rain which I find to be pretty accurate, about as accurate as Dark Sky.
There’s largely a perception problem with Apple. People loved Dark Sky as an independent small app that worked well, before Apple took it and destroyed it. Now, even if Apple incorporated all of the same data and features, it still wouldn’t give that same spark of joy people had.
I still think DarkSky made it easier to visualize the day. With Apple, when I tap on a day to see the details, the temperature and rain forecasts are in two separate graphs, instead of being unified into one easily glanceable view.
This is what I really liked about DarkSky. I didn’t have to read and understand the forecast, I could simply glance at it and intuitively have an understanding of the day’s weather. Apple lost this, and I think it is what gave DarkSky so much value.
Even without any text labels, you should be able to get a feel for what the weather is and how it will change:
- Hourly plots like Dark Sky, with everything (temperature, rain, AQI, weather conditions) in a single plot.
- The change in temperature visualized with both color and space. Space is obvious (higher -> hotter); color ranges from red for hottest to blue for coldest. All the visible plots share the same color-temperature mapping. So the gradient block to the left shows both the temperature range for that day as well as how it compares to other days.
I find Apple weather incredibly frustrating… I keep wanting to use it like I used dark sky, but it’s just not there… And I still don’t think it’s as accurate. At least not in Europe. I remember with dark sky being able to know if it’s rain, and for how long it will continue raining to the minute
Huge bag of data for you to mess around with. I've started to use it to do my own weather forecasting instead of relying on forecasting services. Where I live has a radar gap(Oregon) and ridiculously varied terrain, so forecasts aren't great anyway.
> The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time
Interesting, I think it's gotten worse over time. Even basics like what the temperature will be in a few days. It's consistently ~5+ degrees off on the low side.
Among all the destruction Apple has wrought when they killed DarkSky, they also failed to bring back the weather history feature. You could go back decades and see the weather anytime, anywhere. I miss it so.
If you are interested in German weather, I can recommend the DWD WarnWetter App. It is so good that the competitors sued when it was free. Now it costs a one-time fee of about 3€.
I've learned that I just want to look at the radar. There's a big difference between "it's going to drizzle all day" and "spotty storms within 25 miles of you"
It wasn’t as much focused on high level information visualization as Dark Sky, but I also still miss the original Wunderground and its precipitation prediction cones and radar features that were accurate down to the second back before it was acquired by the weather channel, where it went to die of neglect.
This topic raises an issue I’ve had in mind for a while, companies are not realizing their true value when they sell out to some exit, as is evident by the fact that the companies Andy what they created end up being taken out behind the shed. If a competitor is willing to pay a certain amount without extreme pain to the point of convulsion or you don’t get air tight contract that prevents killing off the service/product without it remitting back to the founders or being made open source, you are being low-balled.
Taking the Wunderground example, those folks would have ended up owning the weather channel and probably buying or merging with Dark Sky and being the data provider to Apple instead of the Weather Channel characters (in case you don’t know about that entity) owning and killing off their baby.
I still use Wunderground since it utilizes base stations within my own neighborhood, so the data is accurate down to the street level. Its precipitation percentages have also been much more accurate than Apple weather over the last few years (for me).
Lobbying is not going to have an effect on that unless you have magnitudes greater pain to dish up than the industry lobbyists have gifts to bear. It's a big circle of mutual gratification and you aren't in it. If you have been lobbying that long with no effect, it's because of that. If you have any information, you should think about taking it to the OMG to see if they are interested, able to do a candid hidden camera thing. That might make a difference if it is done right.
I have been using breezy weather and I like it overall. But after reading this article I can't help but be bugged off that the information density in the main page is significantly worse here than in Dark Sky.
Dark Sky showed hourly forecast with a 2h resolution. This is a negligible difference in precision IMHO (weather predictions are inherently imprecise anyway - and a more precise graph could be - is - one tap away), but it allows to show a time range that is twice as wide! On my screen, breezy weather is able to show me the forecast for the next 5h until I scroll - this is OK, but it's annoying. The hours are very spaced apart, and there is a 1h resolution. With tighter spacing and 2h resolution, 12 or 16 hours could be displayed at once - which is far more likely to cover the time I am going to spend outside, which as the article states, is the main reason why I might want to check an hourly forecast anyway.
All the other android apps mentioned here have the same issue.
I might try to open an issue in their GH, or even a PR... A toggle for "denser graphs" and a setting for hourly resolution could do wonders.
I've mainly used YR:s API, it's no fuss, no registration and the data is good enough for me in a neighbouring country. It's a perk that they have some neat widget endpoints that consume a location and generate an image.
Nice to see how much you've developed Sunsethue over the last two years! I remember I built myself some custom alert logic back with your API even before the public launch :)
A year and a half or something later.. I recently started a project of my own trying to bring all "weather dependent" photo opportunities together in one place, if you wouldn't mind I would be happy to experiment with bringing Sunsethue data to https://photoweather.app - your prediction model is certainly a lot more sophisticated than mine and it would be very cool to offer that
Wow, looks like a very cool project! Feel free to experiment with the Sunsethue API! Send me an email if you'd need a higher quota to play around with.
For the ones who might be interested, Yr.no uses the ECMWF (European weather model) as their main data source. This model scores the best on benchmarks of the global weather models (available for the whole world), but AI models are catching up on some parameters. Still, there are local weather models available with a much higher resolution (these are regional and only have forecasts up to a couple days). Examples are ICON-D2, Arome, Harmonie for parts of Europe, and HRRR for the US. I'm not sure which apps use these models though.
Yes Dark Sky had the best UI of any weather app I have used.
I now use Weathergraph which does it differently but I would go back to Dark Sky (and pay for it) in a flash.
It shows the correct things and on a phone understands that showing the temperatures across the screen is useless as if I go out I want to know what the weather is like when I might make the journey back in 8+ hours time. I might not care what the weather is in 4 hours time as I will be inside.
To those who are interested in viewing the “shape” of weather data (and who are using an apple device), I cannot recommend https://www.weatherstrip.app enough. I think its visualization is even superior to Dark Sky’s, mostly by virtue of being more compact without losing anything.
I liked that idea but found it a little busy so I started working on the weather layout I always wish I had. Heavily inspired by Weather Line, Dark Sky, NOAA line view but attempting to make it single screen: https://www.threads.com/@johnsheehan/post/DTHnd_HDbRM
Yes, this is my main weather app and I think I've recommended it here before. There's another app that's slightly less elegant, but has more knobs to turn in Weathergraph. https://weathergraph.app/
I am surprised no one mentioned Carrot as a replacement! I have been using it for years. they don't have their own source of data, they are mostly a good UI, and you need to select a data source like Apple Weather or others.
+1 to Carrot. I’m a huge fan. The annual subscription is pricey but I travel a lot and it’s consistently one of the most accurate apps I’ve used and I tried a bunch! They even have an “I miss Dark Sky” setting that makes the UI a clone of Dark Sky
Looking at the screenshots, Dark Sky does something bad that I think most other weather apps do badly as well.
Specifically: each day has a range (low and high) but it's not clear whether the low is for the morning or evening, and they could be vastly different. You could have 10-15 one day then 0-10 the next day, and think "Ok, I'll go out tonight and bring a jacket but no hat since the lowest it'll get today is 10 and whoops, actually it's freezing by the time dinner's over.
There are so many ways apps could do this better. Like showing a vertical line graph rather than discrete bars, with the lows inbetween days. Or if you want to keep the bars, make them angled, so the low is closer to the morning/night it's associated with. Or even show 3 temperatures, not just two! (one being the low for the previous or next day or whatever)
Hey, developer of a iOS App here.
I created Pyxis (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6639617144) . The app is a location saving app but it also has weather forecast features.
I think the hourly forecast I created shows what you might be looking for. It shows the highs and lows by the hour.
I enjoyed this write-up on UI design and Visualization topic.
The table of user "context and situation" is a great document. You can easily envision authoring this table and scrolling to the right of your initial columns (A,B) to see further into the design process,
A) "When I hear about a storm, I want to prepare my loved ones, my property, etc.
B) Storm forecast ... :
- Where is the storm right now and is it heading my direction?
[...]
N) _Show the storm front using _directional arrows_ ... (compact and replaces need for animation)_
The last section concludes in praise of the design and includes this: _"rigorously iterated on data visualization design". I wish we would have seen evidence of this, principally in the form of older screen shots of the design.
I think design iteration is the difference between mere good design and good products, and legendary product design.
Personally, I'd love to see a write up of my favorite whipping post, Transit App. Oh boy did that app go down hill, and with such great potential.
I miss Dark Sky for its impressive "local weather at a glance" accuracy and UX -- but Windy.app is pretty great too, with more details than DS ever had. They're maybe slightly complementary, given Windy.app is more like "prosumer" weather forecasting for nautical purposes, but I highly recommend it.
From my quick research, it seems like people in the sailing community actually prefer Windy.com to Windy.app. (yes, there's a very confusing name clash)
Ventusky and Windy.com are my go to nowadays. They give me a ton of information which enables me to make my own decisions about weather. The ability to change forecasting models really quickly is nice, too. The ventusky android app is pretty decent, too.
It's amazing to me that nobody has been able to match their UX (Apple in particular - how did they fumble the acquisition so badly?). The Weather Channel by most accounts has the best model but one of the worst websites of all time. live.xweather.com (formerly Aeris) is kind of close, but is basically an ad for their API/commercial subscriptions and not really built for day-to-day use. Some of the open source clones have the UI 80% of the way there but their forecasts aren't as accurate.
I've settled on using the built-in Android weather app, but it pales in comparison to Dark Sky, in every respect.
Carrot is a pay app but it has a vertical view that matches Dark Sky in everything but Map, and I use it all the time, mostly with Apple Weather as the source (no source is as good as Dark Sky was (and I compared Dark Sky and Apple Weather when both were overlapping), the others have not been as good at my location).
I don’t know if Carrot can use Apple Weather as a source on Android. Also it seems like the Android version is not in active development.
One of the things that made Dark Sky so great was its simplicity and focus. Apple Weather has added many of DS’s features over the past few years, but it’s so much more busy and dense with information. This is a problem that Carrot Weather and many of the other apps mentioned in the comments here also have. There was something very special about that app, and I really do miss it (also Apollo, Google Reader, Gaia GPS, and all the other apps that were canceled or turned into bloated monstrosities before their time).
I just downloaded it to try it out after seeing it in a few comments. While some of the visualizations seem like ones I could get used to and like, the radar is severely lacking. I use radar a lot and DarkSky’s view was amazing and just fun to play with. Weather Graph has it buried at the bottom and just loads up weather.gov. It’s hard to justify paying a premium with radar feeling pretty ignored. His website mentions radar won’t be coming in the near term. I think that’s a deal breaker for me.
Both give you a huge amount of layers and datasets to mess around with. Windy recently changed their radar stuff, though, so it might be a bit confusing.
Hi, I know it took much longer than it should have, but I have multiple locations implemented now and am adding the final polish before release - here are few screenshots:
https://imgur.com/a/2vMAJHB
I should be able to release it before the end of January.
> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands.
So true.
Open Meteo supports 28 different WMO weather condition codes[1]. Most weather apps only support half as many. (Just "rain" instead of light/moderate/heavy rain.)
Showing all 28 is less helpful because of the noise. More useful just to show it might rain for a period of several hours vs oscillating between light rain and heavy rain. The light vs heavy precision wasn't worth it when there was high uncertainty whether it would even rain at all.
So https://weather-sense.leftium.com consolidates hours with similar weather conditions into a single segment by default. You can click on the weather icons at the left of the plots to toggle the original unconsolidated view.
So what happened with previous customers who (I'm presuming) paid for the app? Did their app keep running or were they given a refund? I am guessing it used publicly available weather data, but even then, if the server names changed (and support was ended), wouldn't the app quit working?
I paid for it and got nothing at all. I don't remember if the app quit working or if Apple force removed it from my phone.I felt absolutely scammed - it's literally the only app I've ever paid for.
It really sucks. Do they use the same data? I've noticed Apple Weather is substantially less accurate than Dark Sky. If Dark Sky told me it was going to rain in 10 minutes for 7 minutes, that's what was going to happen. If Apple Weather says it, well, maybe.
DarkSky seemed to have their own weather service (not sure the source data), but they had their own API that other apps used. Apple shut the API down after a couple years. This meant the death of the DarkSky website and the old apps.
Apple says they use data from the weather channel, but this varies based on country. It used to say right in the app, but it seems like they removed that in favor of this link:
I was an android user when it went offline. When Apple bought it they kind of mothballed it for a year or so, no updates but it still worked. Then they took the apps off the stores, but the API was still enabled for a lil while longer, so other services still functioned for the most part.
Then one day it just stopped working and it all went away. But it took apple ~18 months or so to kill it off, if I remember right.
I’m surprised how many places in the world measure rain in percentage chance. Must be a metropolitan concept. Here in Denmark, weather reports estimate mm/hr - the amount of rain. Maybe it’s our agricultural inheritance?
The two things are not strictly related, you could have 30% chance of heavy rain, or 90% chance of light rain. Both are needed and many apps have both.
mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.
When I’m riding my bike, I use the weather.gov weather graphs. It took me a little bit to read it at a glance, but it’s all the information for the next couple days in graph form. (2 more days a click away) They have the whole week summary on the main forecast page, but I find the graph really useful.
I still mourn the loss of Weatherspark's old Flash interface, which brilliantly displayed all of this data in a single pane to give context to the recent, current, and forecasted weather. I've never seen as concise a visualization of current and historical weather data.
We took a lot of inspiration from darksky and this post when designing the forecast tab in the Precip (YC W24) app. The app started out just as historical weather, but we recently added forecasts if you want to check it out. https://precip.ai
Rain radar is something I'm always looking at online, it's easy to fast forward from an hour back and see whats about to hit you.
I think that would make a great single purpose mobile app - automatically knows where the sources of information are and shows you the rain - where it was, and where it is going.
Data visualization. This very phrase brought to mind Tableau. Their core principle was data visualization and then they were acquired by Salesforce and became enterprise software. A call to a eulogy for dear Tableau.
it always felt to me like the major innovation behind darksky was the clever exploitation of newly broadly available precision gps. prior to darksky, i'd look at the radar picture on my smartphone and the pin where i was to try and figure out when it would start raining, darksky seemed to just package this really nicely with visualizations and notifications.
(and yes, the visualizations were beautiful, but the real key was being able to see exactly where one was with respect to the radar picture and to be able to use already existing forward predictions of the radar picture in conjunction with precise gps to generate timeseries/events.)
People are guaranteed to be opinionated about weather apps. I personally use Meteogram (on android). There you see graphs of every weather related quantity you want on a single widget.
That in combination with ventusky gives me everything I need.
Because most of Apple's designers do not have the discipline or the blessedly smaller scope to consistently output well designed interfaces anymore, and are riding the momentum of those that came before and the current of hot air of their own supply these days.
The idea that Apple is full of good designers should be forgotten. They're as mid and sloppy as any other large tech company.
In Carrot and Apple Weather, I think the daily temperature graphs should be chronological so for those days where the low is late at night (temperature drops all day) you know when the cold is happening at a glance.
The app is great, but unfortunately it only works in Switzerland. The same company also developed a german version (DWD WarnWetter, works for all of Europe), and recently a worldwide one (Fluid Meteo).
Bummer. It looks cool but no updates in five years. That doesn't bother me, except I wonder when Apple will kick it off the store. It also doesn't say anything about the privacy and data collected.
A website dedicated to data visualization and it's totally broken on Desktop Firefox. If they had just created a straightforward article, it would be perfectly legible, but all the flashy-flash just makes it unintelligible.
Stop trying to hold VCs to account as they try to buy all the ram in the world with infinite pretend money and their infinite pretend profits to put in their infinite pretend GPUs and their infinite pretend capacity, supported by the infinite pretend infrastructure that will never exist that we will also be forced to pay for.
Carrot does this, but Dark Sky was more than just a repeat of weather data from other sources. They built their own geographic models with feedback to create their hyperlocal forecasts. Apple has that technology but their implementation hasn’t seemed to be as good (possibly because their feedback loop is slow).
Why did you think AI has the capability of creating an app with a ton of care and unique touch put into it as opposed to some hello world/proof of concept skeleton app?
Oh how I miss DarkSky, and accuracy in weather apps in general. I have no idea if it is AI or just enshitification, but wow, local temps are just always way off with Apple Weather and most other apps. This is important to me because I live in my van and I am talking about these apps being off 5 to 10 degrees. The only one that comes close is Accuweather but their interface is horrific. And forget about the widgets...just show me the highs and lows for the week and quit changing the layout like you think i know what I want, because you do not.
Checkout forecast advisor. It ranks forecasting services for a location and gives you a summary forecast based on all the different services for that location.
Whenever I travel I find it pretty helpful. Certain services are just garbage in some areas.
For example, Foreca is like 84% accurate for my home location, but it's only 60% accurate for one of the cabins I frequent.
What drives me crazy is Apple redesigned their weather app not so long after acquiring dark sky. I was anticipating a polished, updated version of Dark Sky's UI. Instead we have the current design, which is quite frankly terrible.
Fortunately someone recreated a clone at https://merrysky.net, which was featured [1] on HN some time ago.
I've used it daily since.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191
It renders the information totally different. How can it be a clone?
Inspired by MerrySky: https://weather-sense.leftium.com
Some differences:
- Shows weather from yesterday for comparison
- All hourly plot trackers connected; not just the top one
- Includes AQI
- Sky color visualization (try scrubbing across dawn/dusk!)
- Non-precipitation colors approximate sky color (haziness)
- Temperature variation visualized both spatially and with colors
- Data source is Open Meteo
- Planned: 60 minutely forecast like https://openweathermap.org
There's no obvious way to change the location of the prediction. Can it be done, to support the "travelling soon" use cases?
Yes, but currently only possible via url param:
- https://weather-sense.leftium.com/?n=nyc
n is short for "name" and uses the Open Meteo geocoding API[1].
[1]: https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/geocoding-api
And a toast to its source, the drop-in PirateWeather API: https://pirateweather.net/
Thanks for the mention! I'm the author of merrysky. Opened to feedback. What would you say you miss the most?
Not missed but ideas for the future
* Adopt a colour scheme with similarity to the old BOM?
* Some way to store longer baseline movie animations in local state so people can avoid cost in you but run the weather radar for longer?
* Tide info? Hyper specific to people who do water things. Willyweather does this really well.
I use Willyweather and Windy. I used to use a weather app written by some mob called "shifty jelly" and their git logs were .. hysterical. Drunk fairy penguins seemed to cause most of the bugs.
Dataviz suggestions from top of the page to the bottom:
- Location search & display: no English version, only localized names, which is hard to reason if you don't know native language.
- Summary: a) what does precip. in % mean and how it correlates with cm? b) pressure is only displayed in hPa, while some countries prefer mmHg; c) what does ozone index mean and why is it important?
- Next 24 hours: visual indication for temp variation through the day would be easier to reason than just by looking at numbers (as discussed in TFA).
- Next 7 days: a) unnecessary precision for y-axis (e.g. 10.9°C vs. 11°C); b) band overshoot actual values (e.g. if I see 10..−10°C, I assume that would be max/min temp, but in fact it is 8..−9°C, which is impossible to tell without hovering mouse over); c) no horiz. line through 0°C; d) no horiz. lines through y-axis ticks, which makes it harder to reason about values closer to the end of the graph; e) precip. in cm tells little, especially when band is alike (0.00..0.80 cm) - peaks on graphs look like a lot, in fact they are not? g) seeing blue precip. graph subconsciously means 'rain' to me, while in fact it would be snow; f) labels for y-axis are at the same time very small, rotated 90° and also take too much horizontal space from the graph.
- Map: moving mouse over next 7 days graph causes time shown on map to change that would make sense if map's timeline would cover all 7 days, but it only covers small part of today.
- Week: a) fog icons look like they have solid white square background, which seems to be off compared to other icons; b) low/high values are hard to reason about, especially when it says 'Low … at 11am' and there is no tick labeled '11am' (10am .. 12pm) - displaying a line through coldest/warmest hours with °C value next to it would be much easier to understand.
Also: displaying air quality prediction based on last year's AQ would be helpful.
Could you tell me the significance of the location in Australia that's used by default? I frequently clear browser cookies and history so it often jumps back there, so I see that location a lot, but can never envision exactly why it was the default. (Specifically, a point along Gol Gol Road in Arumpo, NSW, Australia.)
May be too specific but as a European in the US, I would love to be able to see temperature in F and C at the same time!
Thx bro. I stumbled into this thread thinking it was about something else, and left with a new favorite weather bookmark.
Nice things:
You might also like https://weather-sense.leftium.com
This is neat, but I find the charts extremely hard to parse due to the color gradients and the similar shades, especially of blue and teal. I find the Merry Sky charts a lot easier to understand.
Thanks for the feedback. You helped make my app more readable (I went a little overboard on the gradients; I thought the gradients would help convey the sky condition):
- Now most gradients are disabled by default. (toggle here: https://weather-sense.leftium.com/wmo-codes)
- Also added shadow/glow to plot lines so they "pop out" more.
I'm not sure which parts you think are blue and teal. Open to suggestions for better colors! (There are only so many colors, and I like keeping the precipitation related colors all bluish.)
Perhaps I should add an option to disable gradients.
There's a screen shot showing what it used to look like before gradients: https://github.com/Leftium/weather-sense
It's not clear how to switch to sane units of measurement.
You mean you prefer C over F? Tapping any temperature will toggle between the two. (This always comes up, so the app should probably default to units based on the user's location: the default is F only if the app detects you're in the US)
- Toggling C/F also toggles the scale on the radar to km. Eventually, I will get around to adding a dedicated settings page.
- However, the app was designed so one could get a sense of the weather without numeric labels: temperature is a very relative experience, so use the spatial/color cues to compare yesterday, today, and forecast days.
- Notice now much more space C needs when toggling between C and F. F's 0 to 99 range fits the natural range of temperatures humans experience (weather, body temperature). Humans just don't experience anything beyond 50 degrees C. At the same time, a single delta C is too large for the precision human bodies can detect. (Humans need something closer to 0.5C precision, which is what 1 degree F is.)
- As as result C needs nearly twice as much horizontal space compared to F: due to going negative more often and needing an extra decimal for minimal precision required.
I'd sneak in 'Toggle C/F' somewhere and hook it to the same function you use on the numbers.
Fahrenheit goes negative at a measly -18C. Where I live -20 to -30C is not uncommon. Whether it's 17.5 or 18C typically does not matter, continual changes in wind and other factors will for pretty much all practical purposes quench that difference.
Fair enough. I added a toggle button and removed decimal °C.
Weather uncertainty may make that extra precision less useful.
Great rec! Thanks! See also Windy.app (a paid app w/ great dataviz, dx, and robust set of data sources).
Windy.app looks good visually, but once you start using it, the UX is all over the place. Always find it frustrating.
Interesting! I used it heavily for years as a sailor and found it intuitive. Clearly, YMMV. :)
for what it's worth, most people i know prefer windy.com over windy.app
Windy.app is for wind based water activities. Windy.com is a data-heavy weather information site.
As a windsurfer, wingfoiler, and kitesurfer i can only say that both Windy.app a nd Windy.com are awesome. Like the ability to compare different models easily.
Dark Sky was a marvel, and when it first came out, its ability to say rain will start where you are in 2-3 minutes was a marvel.
The information design argument is 100% valid, but I also marvel that, having bought the company, Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate. I don't know whether Apple's privacy focus prevents them making the same precise predictions, or if there is some other reason they don't, but it's sad that in 2025 we don't have the same level of performance as we did twelve years ago.
> Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate
Is it not? The rainfall-per-minute over the next hour on iOS seems about the same accuracy as Dark Sky had -- I used Dark Sky for years. It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough, same as iOS did after. You can even scrub the precipitation map predictions and they look the same to me.
I know the Dark Sky prediction accuracy was greatly dependent on where you lived -- this is something that was widely discussed back in the day. If you've seen a drop in accuracy, did you simply move?
I used the Dark Sky app since it came out in 2012. I used to consistently get notifications about precipitation with Dark Sky, that were consistently accurate. The Apple weather application seems less motivated to send me notifications with any sort of regularity. I almost never get them now, even with fresh iOS installs. I haven't moved either.
And just anecdotally, Dark Sky was a delight to use. Apple Maps makes it a chore to extract the same utility from their app.
OK, notifications aren't the same as accuracy though. Neither is delight. I'm just talking about the supposed drop in accuracy that I just don't see.
(And Apple notifications are a mess generally. I constantly have notifications for something yesterday only show up today. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Weather specifically, their whole notification priority system is borked.)
I think the point was (and i'm certain my experience is) that with Apple Weather you just don't get the notifications at all (or rarely do) so it's very hard to get a feeling as to how accurate they are.
Yes, this is what I meant. I don't know what the notification thresholds are, so I use the fact that I'm getting a notification at all as a proxy for accuracy.
Got it. Yeah, where I am it's usually pretty obvious that it's probably going to rain in the next hour or two, so I look at the chart to see exactly when. I don't rely on notifications. So for me the accuracy seems the same. But if you're basing it on notifications then I could totally see why you could have a different impression.
I think -- and I might be wrong, since this is from over a decade ago -- that when I first used Dark Sky, I ended up disabling notifications because it would constantly warn me of precipitation, but then when I checked the graph there was none because the model had since updated, and I wound up turning them off. So notification thresholds are probably something hard to get right, and what is appropriate for one geographic area might not be optimal for another.
Back then (2010-2013ish) I was driving a motorcycle primarily so I was hyper aware of the immediate weather and Dark Sky was like magic in that use case.
Dark Sky would say “Light rain staring in 4 minutes and ending in 17 minutes” and that’s what would happen.
Apple Weather is nothing like this.
Anecdotally, I agree with the parent comment.
Lived in the same general area (just outside a major metropolitan area) where I use DarkSky and now Apple Weather app.
DarkSky has better data vis and more reliable prediction. Apple Weather consistently over predicts snow fall amounts and many times I’ve had to use the Feedback to correct it on current conditions (e.g. raining when it says no rain or vice versa). I believe DarkSky had the same feedback feature but I never needed it this much.
Most of the time AW is fine but it’s less good to the point I’ve considered alternatives.
I haven't done the stats, so I should probably have said "Apple's weather app still doesn't seem as precise or accurate"
That said, I'd still bet a dollar (that to be fair, I might lose) that Apple today is less accurate, and if they're just as accurate twelve years on, that's a fail as well.
Haven't moved for years, but yeah same over here. Darksky data seemed perfect and now no matter what source of data I use in places like Carrot or the ios weather app gives me the accuracy Darksky had. Is it just climate change? I have no idea, but I agree, accuracy seems lost now without Darksky proper.
checkout forecastadvisor.com and see what's the best for your area.
I've sort of transitioned to using Ventusky and Windy to checkout the big picture stuff, then I make up my own mind about precipitation. I live in the PNW of the US and our terrain is so varied that forecasting services are kind of meh in general. They're decent for "it might rain for a while today" but anything hyperlocal tends to get bad because of the terrain in Oregon.
Probably depends on where you are, but here in Europe I always joke that you should prepare for the exact opposite of what apple weather tells you. A lot of times I’m literary standing in the rain and Apple tells me the chance for rain is 0%
Right, but Dark Sky had that issue too. When precipitation has hyperlocal variation, you're always going to have that problem.
The Doppler radar that "live" precipitation comes from takes 4-6 min to complete a scan, and then obviously it takes a few minutes for that all to be ingested, update models, and push to devices.
The "live" weather from Apple (and when it was Dark Sky) has always been a prediction from about 10 min ago. And if it's raining where you are but dry six blocks to the north (as happens all the time), it's understandable why it gets it wrong.
Dark Sky almost always over predicted rain for my area. I think that was kind of their strategy. That said, I very much miss Dark Sky on android.
Also I really like a tool called Forecast Advisor. https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ . It shows you the accuracy of various forecasting services for your area.
I use it whenever I travel. I don't stick with one forecast site because depending on the terrain/location their accuracy changes drastically.
Certain models are better for certain geographical features depending on the location. I tend to hangout around a lot of mountains and the difference in forecast models makes a huge difference.
That is basically my impression here in the US PNW. If it tells me rain is about to start at my location, the one thing I know with 100% certainty is that rain is not about to start any time soon.
Yes! The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical, right out of Back to the Future 2. I used this countless times.
So much of weather forecasting, at that time, was about trends and probabilities. DarkSky was about events, certainty, and action.
It was truly ahead of anything else and forced a new standard.
> The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical
But iOS has this now. It's the same thing. They integrated it from Dark Sky.
it doesn't work nearly as well. i'm not sure why, but the predictions are significantly worse than dark sky's were
I agree. One of the weird things is that the precipitation map will show rain coming that doesn't show anywhere else in the Weather app. Nearly every time that happens, the map is the one that's correct. And usually forecast.weather.gov will align with the map as well (and provide a better forecast than the app).
But that's the point. The map is based on the Dark Sky algorithm and only goes out an hour or so. And that's where the next-hour precipitation graph comes from -- and I've never seen them not match. Everything else is standard weather forecasts. Dark Sky itself worked the same way. It wasn't making 6-hour forecasts using its 1-hour algorithm. The results would have been terrible.
This is why I don't understand the complaints that iOS precipitation accuracy is worse than Dark Sky's. The map works the same way. The chart works the same way. Complaints about UX I get. But not the complaints about a supposed fall in precipitation accuracy.
I get that it's a common trope that products always supposedly get worse once they're bought. But in this case, in terms of accuracy, I just don't think it's true. And remember, Apple would have zero reason to worsen the quality. The whole point of buying it was to improve iOS weather. Which it did.
to each their own, but i used darksky for years as a daily bicycle commuter and found it to be profoundly accurate--to the point where i could use it to find clear patches of 15-20min to ride home in. there was a marked decline in the reliability & accuracy of the information provided to me once i was forced to switch to apple weather
I dunno. I literally use Apple Weather for that (can I run an errand in the next 25 min before the rain comes back) and it works the same as it did with Dark Sky. No decline that I've noticed. Like, it doesn't suddenly start raining after only 10 min when the app said I'd have 25 min.
Agreed, that’s what won me over to Dark Sky. Now I use Carrot Weather and like that a lot, the “it’s going to rain hard in XX minutes” notifications are awesome, especially with a dog. I’ve gotten that notification close to a normal time I’d take the dog out and been able to run him outside before it pours rain for the next hour.
Kind of feel like watching Spiderman tonight and I don't know why hehe.
In all seriousness I heard some good things of dark sky. My current weather app is windy.com and I believe it's more built for surfers and such (??) - not sure what the best android weather app is.
I've never understood why Apple didn't adapt Dark Sky's design lessons. Apple Weather is functional, but dull.
The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time, though it’s still not a perfect replacement.
Scrolling through the Dark Sky screenshots, I can recognize many of the same things now incorporated with Apple’s. And Apple does offer location specific notifications of rain which I find to be pretty accurate, about as accurate as Dark Sky.
There’s largely a perception problem with Apple. People loved Dark Sky as an independent small app that worked well, before Apple took it and destroyed it. Now, even if Apple incorporated all of the same data and features, it still wouldn’t give that same spark of joy people had.
I still think DarkSky made it easier to visualize the day. With Apple, when I tap on a day to see the details, the temperature and rain forecasts are in two separate graphs, instead of being unified into one easily glanceable view.
This is what I really liked about DarkSky. I didn’t have to read and understand the forecast, I could simply glance at it and intuitively have an understanding of the day’s weather. Apple lost this, and I think it is what gave DarkSky so much value.
I designed https://weather-sense.leftium.com to make it easier to visualize both the day and week.
Even without any text labels, you should be able to get a feel for what the weather is and how it will change:
- Hourly plots like Dark Sky, with everything (temperature, rain, AQI, weather conditions) in a single plot.
- The change in temperature visualized with both color and space. Space is obvious (higher -> hotter); color ranges from red for hottest to blue for coldest. All the visible plots share the same color-temperature mapping. So the gradient block to the left shows both the temperature range for that day as well as how it compares to other days.
- Finally, there is a weekly overview at the top.
> still not a perfect replacement
Not a replacement at all for Android subscribers!
Dark Sky was one of my favorite apps. MyRadar Pro is probably the best replacement, but it’s missing some of the core features.
I find Apple weather incredibly frustrating… I keep wanting to use it like I used dark sky, but it’s just not there… And I still don’t think it’s as accurate. At least not in Europe. I remember with dark sky being able to know if it’s rain, and for how long it will continue raining to the minute
I really like Ventusky and Windy.com
Huge bag of data for you to mess around with. I've started to use it to do my own weather forecasting instead of relying on forecasting services. Where I live has a radar gap(Oregon) and ridiculously varied terrain, so forecasts aren't great anyway.
> The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time
Interesting, I think it's gotten worse over time. Even basics like what the temperature will be in a few days. It's consistently ~5+ degrees off on the low side.
Among all the destruction Apple has wrought when they killed DarkSky, they also failed to bring back the weather history feature. You could go back decades and see the weather anytime, anywhere. I miss it so.
The Apple Weather app absolutely sucks.
I have learned to ignore its predictions. It will say that it's sunny outside, and I'll look out the window, and we're having a hailstorm.
Can anyone recommend a good app to replace it? No ads, lightweight etc.
If you are interested in German weather, I can recommend the DWD WarnWetter App. It is so good that the competitors sued when it was free. Now it costs a one-time fee of about 3€.
I’ve been happy with Carrot.
https://weather-sense.leftium.com: just a web app, but you can add it to your home screen to access like an app[1]
[1]: https://polarhabits.com/mobile
MyRadar, but a bit of the opposite.
I've learned that I just want to look at the radar. There's a big difference between "it's going to drizzle all day" and "spotty storms within 25 miles of you"
Edit: Google Gemini suggested Hello Weather and loving it so far.
https://weather-sense.leftium.com shows the past two days of weather, could be configured to show up to 90.
- The data is from https://open-meteo.com
- It would be trivial to connect the historical weather API (back to 1940): https://openmeteo.substack.com/p/processing-90-tb-historical...
It wasn’t as much focused on high level information visualization as Dark Sky, but I also still miss the original Wunderground and its precipitation prediction cones and radar features that were accurate down to the second back before it was acquired by the weather channel, where it went to die of neglect.
This topic raises an issue I’ve had in mind for a while, companies are not realizing their true value when they sell out to some exit, as is evident by the fact that the companies Andy what they created end up being taken out behind the shed. If a competitor is willing to pay a certain amount without extreme pain to the point of convulsion or you don’t get air tight contract that prevents killing off the service/product without it remitting back to the founders or being made open source, you are being low-balled.
Taking the Wunderground example, those folks would have ended up owning the weather channel and probably buying or merging with Dark Sky and being the data provider to Apple instead of the Weather Channel characters (in case you don’t know about that entity) owning and killing off their baby.
I still use Wunderground since it utilizes base stations within my own neighborhood, so the data is accurate down to the street level. Its precipitation percentages have also been much more accurate than Apple weather over the last few years (for me).
this is a lil off topic, but fuck the weather channel.
they've been lobbying for like a decade to get NOAA defunded. They're basically the Intuit/turbotax of the meteorology world.
Lobbying is not going to have an effect on that unless you have magnitudes greater pain to dish up than the industry lobbyists have gifts to bear. It's a big circle of mutual gratification and you aren't in it. If you have been lobbying that long with no effect, it's because of that. If you have any information, you should think about taking it to the OMG to see if they are interested, able to do a candid hidden camera thing. That might make a difference if it is done right.
A really good Android open source alternative is Breezy Weather: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather
There is a really good iOS app called Brzzy Weather! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brzzy-weather/id6670187343
Breezy Weather and Weather Master right now are IMO the two best open source weather apps on Android
https://github.com/PranshulGG/WeatherMaster
I have been using breezy weather and I like it overall. But after reading this article I can't help but be bugged off that the information density in the main page is significantly worse here than in Dark Sky. Dark Sky showed hourly forecast with a 2h resolution. This is a negligible difference in precision IMHO (weather predictions are inherently imprecise anyway - and a more precise graph could be - is - one tap away), but it allows to show a time range that is twice as wide! On my screen, breezy weather is able to show me the forecast for the next 5h until I scroll - this is OK, but it's annoying. The hours are very spaced apart, and there is a 1h resolution. With tighter spacing and 2h resolution, 12 or 16 hours could be displayed at once - which is far more likely to cover the time I am going to spend outside, which as the article states, is the main reason why I might want to check an hourly forecast anyway.
All the other android apps mentioned here have the same issue.
I might try to open an issue in their GH, or even a PR... A toggle for "denser graphs" and a setting for hourly resolution could do wonders.
I prefer Bura[1] over it, Breezy doesn't communicate the daily things I need (and that the link talks about) as well for me
1: https://github.com/davidtakac/bura/
After darksky was shutdown I ended up using, https://www.yr.no/en . I've not seen it recommended here before and thought someone might enjoy it
They've also got a developer interface - https://developer.yr.no
One of the things that I've seen with them that I haven't seen with others is the cloud cover by layer.
https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-6301678/United%20States...
https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-6301678/United%20States...
For doing photography (sunsets) there's a significant difference between 50% high clouds and 50% low clouds.
I've mainly used YR:s API, it's no fuss, no registration and the data is good enough for me in a neighbouring country. It's a perk that they have some neat widget endpoints that consume a location and generate an image.
That L/M/H cloud breakdown is always beneficial, "Clear Outside" also has a similar feature in the forecast https://clearoutside.com/forecast/50.7/-3.52
I know that this is shameless self-promotion, but maybe this could interest you: https://sunsethue.com/ :)
Nice to see how much you've developed Sunsethue over the last two years! I remember I built myself some custom alert logic back with your API even before the public launch :)
A year and a half or something later.. I recently started a project of my own trying to bring all "weather dependent" photo opportunities together in one place, if you wouldn't mind I would be happy to experiment with bringing Sunsethue data to https://photoweather.app - your prediction model is certainly a lot more sophisticated than mine and it would be very cool to offer that
Wow, looks like a very cool project! Feel free to experiment with the Sunsethue API! Send me an email if you'd need a higher quota to play around with.
For the ones who might be interested, Yr.no uses the ECMWF (European weather model) as their main data source. This model scores the best on benchmarks of the global weather models (available for the whole world), but AI models are catching up on some parameters. Still, there are local weather models available with a much higher resolution (these are regional and only have forecasts up to a couple days). Examples are ICON-D2, Arome, Harmonie for parts of Europe, and HRRR for the US. I'm not sure which apps use these models though.
I like graphs that compare various models, that gives you information on the confidence of the prediction, depending on how well they agree. For example https://www.wetterdienst.de/Deutschlandwetter/Berlin/Vorhers...
https://kachelmannwetter.com/ has data from dozens of models, but only in separate maps I think.
Do they provide a Celsius/Fahrenheit toggle? I can't find it.
Looks like you can't on their website, but they do have an IOS and Android App where you can change this
Yes Dark Sky had the best UI of any weather app I have used.
I now use Weathergraph which does it differently but I would go back to Dark Sky (and pay for it) in a flash.
It shows the correct things and on a phone understands that showing the temperatures across the screen is useless as if I go out I want to know what the weather is like when I might make the journey back in 8+ hours time. I might not care what the weather is in 4 hours time as I will be inside.
To those who are interested in viewing the “shape” of weather data (and who are using an apple device), I cannot recommend https://www.weatherstrip.app enough. I think its visualization is even superior to Dark Sky’s, mostly by virtue of being more compact without losing anything.
I liked that idea but found it a little busy so I started working on the weather layout I always wish I had. Heavily inspired by Weather Line, Dark Sky, NOAA line view but attempting to make it single screen: https://www.threads.com/@johnsheehan/post/DTHnd_HDbRM
Yes, this is my main weather app and I think I've recommended it here before. There's another app that's slightly less elegant, but has more knobs to turn in Weathergraph. https://weathergraph.app/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squa... offers Android users the chance to customize a home screen widget with similar info.
Also see weathergraph that does similar graph and shows the temps etc in a downwards colum,n as well
I am surprised no one mentioned Carrot as a replacement! I have been using it for years. they don't have their own source of data, they are mostly a good UI, and you need to select a data source like Apple Weather or others.
+1 to Carrot. I’m a huge fan. The annual subscription is pricey but I travel a lot and it’s consistently one of the most accurate apps I’ve used and I tried a bunch! They even have an “I miss Dark Sky” setting that makes the UI a clone of Dark Sky
They also added the "Inline" theme which is a copy of Dark Sky's
Note: Not related to the light-pollution organization https://darksky.org/
Looking at the screenshots, Dark Sky does something bad that I think most other weather apps do badly as well.
Specifically: each day has a range (low and high) but it's not clear whether the low is for the morning or evening, and they could be vastly different. You could have 10-15 one day then 0-10 the next day, and think "Ok, I'll go out tonight and bring a jacket but no hat since the lowest it'll get today is 10 and whoops, actually it's freezing by the time dinner's over.
There are so many ways apps could do this better. Like showing a vertical line graph rather than discrete bars, with the lows inbetween days. Or if you want to keep the bars, make them angled, so the low is closer to the morning/night it's associated with. Or even show 3 temperatures, not just two! (one being the low for the previous or next day or whatever)
Hey, developer of a iOS App here. I created Pyxis (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6639617144) . The app is a location saving app but it also has weather forecast features.
I think the hourly forecast I created shows what you might be looking for. It shows the highs and lows by the hour.
I hope that solves the problem for you.
I enjoyed this write-up on UI design and Visualization topic.
The table of user "context and situation" is a great document. You can easily envision authoring this table and scrolling to the right of your initial columns (A,B) to see further into the design process,
A) "When I hear about a storm, I want to prepare my loved ones, my property, etc.
B) Storm forecast ... : - Where is the storm right now and is it heading my direction?
[...]
N) _Show the storm front using _directional arrows_ ... (compact and replaces need for animation)_
The last section concludes in praise of the design and includes this: _"rigorously iterated on data visualization design". I wish we would have seen evidence of this, principally in the form of older screen shots of the design.
I think design iteration is the difference between mere good design and good products, and legendary product design.
Personally, I'd love to see a write up of my favorite whipping post, Transit App. Oh boy did that app go down hill, and with such great potential.
I miss Dark Sky for its impressive "local weather at a glance" accuracy and UX -- but Windy.app is pretty great too, with more details than DS ever had. They're maybe slightly complementary, given Windy.app is more like "prosumer" weather forecasting for nautical purposes, but I highly recommend it.
From my quick research, it seems like people in the sailing community actually prefer Windy.com to Windy.app. (yes, there's a very confusing name clash)
I'm the OP, a sailor, and I was referring to the native iOS app.
Ventusky and Windy.com are my go to nowadays. They give me a ton of information which enables me to make my own decisions about weather. The ability to change forecasting models really quickly is nice, too. The ventusky android app is pretty decent, too.
It's amazing to me that nobody has been able to match their UX (Apple in particular - how did they fumble the acquisition so badly?). The Weather Channel by most accounts has the best model but one of the worst websites of all time. live.xweather.com (formerly Aeris) is kind of close, but is basically an ad for their API/commercial subscriptions and not really built for day-to-day use. Some of the open source clones have the UI 80% of the way there but their forecasts aren't as accurate.
I've settled on using the built-in Android weather app, but it pales in comparison to Dark Sky, in every respect.
Carrot is a pay app but it has a vertical view that matches Dark Sky in everything but Map, and I use it all the time, mostly with Apple Weather as the source (no source is as good as Dark Sky was (and I compared Dark Sky and Apple Weather when both were overlapping), the others have not been as good at my location).
I don’t know if Carrot can use Apple Weather as a source on Android. Also it seems like the Android version is not in active development.
One of the things that made Dark Sky so great was its simplicity and focus. Apple Weather has added many of DS’s features over the past few years, but it’s so much more busy and dense with information. This is a problem that Carrot Weather and many of the other apps mentioned in the comments here also have. There was something very special about that app, and I really do miss it (also Apollo, Google Reader, Gaia GPS, and all the other apps that were canceled or turned into bloated monstrosities before their time).
On https://weather-sense.leftium.com the colored boxes in the legend at the top are actually checkboxes.
Toggle only the stats you're interested in! The toggle is persisted to localStorage.
I plan to add more stats, like wind speed and direction, but they will all be toggle-able.
fwiw, on iOS, I like using WeatherGraph: https://weathergraph.app/
The developer is very responsive, lots of UI customization (both app and widgets) is possible, and pricing is reasonable.
I just downloaded it to try it out after seeing it in a few comments. While some of the visualizations seem like ones I could get used to and like, the radar is severely lacking. I use radar a lot and DarkSky’s view was amazing and just fun to play with. Weather Graph has it buried at the bottom and just loads up weather.gov. It’s hard to justify paying a premium with radar feeling pretty ignored. His website mentions radar won’t be coming in the near term. I think that’s a deal breaker for me.
Checkout Ventusky and Windy.com
Both give you a huge amount of layers and datasets to mess around with. Windy recently changed their radar stuff, though, so it might be a bit confusing.
If you are serious about weather radar, consider RadarScope. It is professional grade weather visualization of all products.
If you use radar a lot, have you tried RadarScope? Nothing else even comes close to comparing.
They used to be very responsive. “Multiple locations are on the way” (bottom left corner) has been like that for years now.
Still the best of all the weather apps though.
Hi, I know it took much longer than it should have, but I have multiple locations implemented now and am adding the final polish before release - here are few screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/2vMAJHB
I should be able to release it before the end of January.
Best, Tomas
<3 <3 <3
I was a big fan, the original version was called forecast.io.
It was a rare example at the time when it was _the_ webapp better than any existing 'native' apps.
As a fan of webapps, https://yr.no is a good no-frills weather webapp.
> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands.
So true.
Open Meteo supports 28 different WMO weather condition codes[1]. Most weather apps only support half as many. (Just "rain" instead of light/moderate/heavy rain.)
Showing all 28 is less helpful because of the noise. More useful just to show it might rain for a period of several hours vs oscillating between light rain and heavy rain. The light vs heavy precision wasn't worth it when there was high uncertainty whether it would even rain at all.
So https://weather-sense.leftium.com consolidates hours with similar weather conditions into a single segment by default. You can click on the weather icons at the left of the plots to toggle the original unconsolidated view.
[1]: https://weather-sense.leftium.com/wmo-codes
So what happened with previous customers who (I'm presuming) paid for the app? Did their app keep running or were they given a refund? I am guessing it used publicly available weather data, but even then, if the server names changed (and support was ended), wouldn't the app quit working?
I paid for it and got nothing at all. I don't remember if the app quit working or if Apple force removed it from my phone.I felt absolutely scammed - it's literally the only app I've ever paid for.
It really sucks. Do they use the same data? I've noticed Apple Weather is substantially less accurate than Dark Sky. If Dark Sky told me it was going to rain in 10 minutes for 7 minutes, that's what was going to happen. If Apple Weather says it, well, maybe.
DarkSky seemed to have their own weather service (not sure the source data), but they had their own API that other apps used. Apple shut the API down after a couple years. This meant the death of the DarkSky website and the old apps.
Apple says they use data from the weather channel, but this varies based on country. It used to say right in the app, but it seems like they removed that in favor of this link:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105038
Actually Apple says they use their own data (presumably Dark Sky) and used to use the Weather Channel in the US.
I was an android user when it went offline. When Apple bought it they kind of mothballed it for a year or so, no updates but it still worked. Then they took the apps off the stores, but the API was still enabled for a lil while longer, so other services still functioned for the most part.
Then one day it just stopped working and it all went away. But it took apple ~18 months or so to kill it off, if I remember right.
But there was never any refund or whatnot.
Apple should have just used that app itself, rather than trying to build whatever that they have right now.
I’m surprised how many places in the world measure rain in percentage chance. Must be a metropolitan concept. Here in Denmark, weather reports estimate mm/hr - the amount of rain. Maybe it’s our agricultural inheritance?
If you're deciding whether to dress and prepare for rain you're more curious about whether it will rain or not than the amount.
The two things are not strictly related, you could have 30% chance of heavy rain, or 90% chance of light rain. Both are needed and many apps have both.
https://weather-sense.leftium.com shows both mm/hr and percentage chance.
I've noticed there is a correlation, but having both is useful:
- Often there is a percentage chance, but the mm/hr is 0. At these times, it could rain but will probably be very light.
- Less common, but sometimes there is 0% chance, but a non-zero mm/hr.
Chill a bit with the spamming ;) (7 times in this one post currently)
mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.
Most places I look at report both probability and give a measurement prediction.
So it would be like "60% chance of rain after 2pm, total amount less than 1/10th of an inch"
Meteoswiss has timeserie histogram with of amount of rain with confidence intervals (10th and 90th quantile)
It tells you all you need to know at a glance :)
e.g. see https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/images/1904/website/weather/...
(from https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/weather/weather-and-climate-...)
I miss it too, so I created a web based weather app directly inspired by Dark Sky: https://github.com/hbmartin/open-sun
Clicking History, Forecast, and Notifications at the bottom doesn’t seem to do anything.
When I’m riding my bike, I use the weather.gov weather graphs. It took me a little bit to read it at a glance, but it’s all the information for the next couple days in graph form. (2 more days a click away) They have the whole week summary on the main forecast page, but I find the graph really useful.
Eg;
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3773&lon=-7...
For anyone mourning Dark Sky, I make Weathergraph - visual weather app, which has the Dark Sky-like vertical view as an optional data layout.
It's shown in the middle screenshot at https://weathergraph.app (on desktop, mobile users can check https://impresskit.net/image-download/9161183f-e118-4c75-8f8... )
I just always use the excellent 10-day forecast tab on wunderground
For weather data and amazing visualizations see https://weatherspark.com/
Check out their compare feature. Brilliant.
Eg: Seattle vs London https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/913~45062/Comparison-of-t...
(Not affiliated. Just an admirer.)
I still mourn the loss of Weatherspark's old Flash interface, which brilliantly displayed all of this data in a single pane to give context to the recent, current, and forecasted weather. I've never seen as concise a visualization of current and historical weather data.
Do you maybe have sceeenshots of this? Would love to see some more ways of compacting and visualizing this data in a digestible way.
I really like the primary graph in https://mercuryweather.app/
I still miss Dark Sky, and years later find myself instinctively typing "darksky" into my phone to check weather. Nothing is coming closer...
Notable weather iOS app that I use or have used in the past are:
Wetter: http://plot.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php
weatherstrip : https://www.weatherstrip.app
We took a lot of inspiration from darksky and this post when designing the forecast tab in the Precip (YC W24) app. The app started out just as historical weather, but we recently added forecasts if you want to check it out. https://precip.ai
Rain radar is something I'm always looking at online, it's easy to fast forward from an hour back and see whats about to hit you.
I think that would make a great single purpose mobile app - automatically knows where the sources of information are and shows you the rain - where it was, and where it is going.
Previous discussions (and submissions by OP):
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799 - July 2024 (196 comments)
A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 - March 2023 (251 comments)
Data visualization. This very phrase brought to mind Tableau. Their core principle was data visualization and then they were acquired by Salesforce and became enterprise software. A call to a eulogy for dear Tableau.
it always felt to me like the major innovation behind darksky was the clever exploitation of newly broadly available precision gps. prior to darksky, i'd look at the radar picture on my smartphone and the pin where i was to try and figure out when it would start raining, darksky seemed to just package this really nicely with visualizations and notifications.
(and yes, the visualizations were beautiful, but the real key was being able to see exactly where one was with respect to the radar picture and to be able to use already existing forward predictions of the radar picture in conjunction with precise gps to generate timeseries/events.)
People are guaranteed to be opinionated about weather apps. I personally use Meteogram (on android). There you see graphs of every weather related quantity you want on a single widget. That in combination with ventusky gives me everything I need.
Clearly the author didn't "obsess over how people would actually use" the gallery function on his web page
Look at image. Scroll down to find the next image button. Scroll back up to look at image. On desktop
Can someone explain why the main screen in iOS weather, below the current temperature, shows the high temperature to the left of the low temperature?
In all other places in the app, the low is to the left of high.
Because most of Apple's designers do not have the discipline or the blessedly smaller scope to consistently output well designed interfaces anymore, and are riding the momentum of those that came before and the current of hot air of their own supply these days.
The idea that Apple is full of good designers should be forgotten. They're as mid and sloppy as any other large tech company.
Although having lost their cheif desihner recently there is a chnace thet they might improve and go back to the standards of 10 years ago.
Even worse: why do they use high/low based on calendar date rather than daily high and overnight low.
During a cold snap one cold night will show up as the low for two consecutive days instead of a single “overnight”
In Carrot and Apple Weather, I think the daily temperature graphs should be chronological so for those days where the low is late at night (temperature drops all day) you know when the cold is happening at a glance.
Aple software has gotten so much worse over the past few years. I'm back on Android.
I suggest Weawow, which has both Android and iOS apps. Ad free.
Apple has never been interested in his ability. It's all about having a certain aesthetic that is uniquely apple. That's about it.
Meteoswiss app is the best weather app ever created
The app is great, but unfortunately it only works in Switzerland. The same company also developed a german version (DWD WarnWetter, works for all of Europe), and recently a worldwide one (Fluid Meteo).
I haven't used Dark Sky but on my Android phone, Meteoswiss is definitely very very good
How does it compare to Dark Sky?
Try meteogram
Bummer. It looks cool but no updates in five years. That doesn't bother me, except I wonder when Apple will kick it off the store. It also doesn't say anything about the privacy and data collected.
I knew so many people that used Dark Sky before Apple bought it...
Dark Sky, my love <3
Oh the irony.
A website dedicated to data visualization and it's totally broken on Desktop Firefox. If they had just created a straightforward article, it would be perfectly legible, but all the flashy-flash just makes it unintelligible.
I thought we lived in the age of infinite AI software and you could just ask for a Dark Sky clone.
Weather APIs are pretty open. What's stopping you?
Stop trying to hold VCs to account as they try to buy all the ram in the world with infinite pretend money and their infinite pretend profits to put in their infinite pretend GPUs and their infinite pretend capacity, supported by the infinite pretend infrastructure that will never exist that we will also be forced to pay for.
Carrot does this, but Dark Sky was more than just a repeat of weather data from other sources. They built their own geographic models with feedback to create their hyperlocal forecasts. Apple has that technology but their implementation hasn’t seemed to be as good (possibly because their feedback loop is slow).
Why did you think AI has the capability of creating an app with a ton of care and unique touch put into it as opposed to some hello world/proof of concept skeleton app?
Because hundreds of big Twitter accounts tweet all day that I'm NGMI if I don't think AI is bigger for humanity than agriculture. Duh.
Oh how I miss DarkSky, and accuracy in weather apps in general. I have no idea if it is AI or just enshitification, but wow, local temps are just always way off with Apple Weather and most other apps. This is important to me because I live in my van and I am talking about these apps being off 5 to 10 degrees. The only one that comes close is Accuweather but their interface is horrific. And forget about the widgets...just show me the highs and lows for the week and quit changing the layout like you think i know what I want, because you do not.
Checkout forecast advisor. It ranks forecasting services for a location and gives you a summary forecast based on all the different services for that location.
Whenever I travel I find it pretty helpful. Certain services are just garbage in some areas.
For example, Foreca is like 84% accurate for my home location, but it's only 60% accurate for one of the cabins I frequent.
Unfortunately doesn’t include Apple Weather or AccuWeather so not as useful to me, but top at my location is only 81%.
If you are on iPhone and can afford it, Carrot Weather can show you Accuweather with Dark Sky’s interface.
What drives me crazy is Apple redesigned their weather app not so long after acquiring dark sky. I was anticipating a polished, updated version of Dark Sky's UI. Instead we have the current design, which is quite frankly terrible.
yeah, nothing hits like dark sky hit
See also:
Polaroid
Pebble
Palm
Oldsmobile
Tower Records
Borders
Pan Am
Pebble's back, I thought.
Correct
https://repebble.com/
same same but different — and better