I've used it daily since.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191

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.

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 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.

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)

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've settled on using the built-in Android weather app, but it pales in comparison to Dark Sky, in every respect.

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

It was a rare example at the time when it was _the_ webapp better than any existing 'native' apps.

The developer is very responsive, lots of UI customization (both app and widgets) is possible, and pricing is reasonable.

Eg;

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3773&lon=-7...

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... )

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.)

Wetter: http://plot.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php

weatherstrip : https://www.weatherstrip.app

I suggest Weawow, which has both Android and iOS apps. Ad free.

(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.)

In all other places in the app, the low is to the left of high.

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.

2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799

2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115

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.

Look at image. Scroll down to find the next image button. Scroll back up to look at image. On desktop

Weather APIs are pretty open. What's stopping you?

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.

Polaroid

Pebble

Palm

Oldsmobile

Tower Records

Borders

Pan Am