76 replies
1d2h
Dark Sky was genuinely the most irreplaceable app I've ever used. I don't think I'll ever forgive Apple's butchering it for spare parts.
27 replies
1d1h
The feature I miss most about Dark Sky was that it allowed you to visualize changes in dew point throughout the day.
Where I live (US East Coast), the weather can feel dramatically different depending on the humidity. Relative Humidity has always felt to me like a poor way of measuring how humid the weather will feel. For example, 50% RH at 84ºF will feel lightly humid and generally pleasant, whereas 50% RH at at 97ºF will feel like a swamp. The dew points at those respective points - 63ºF and 75ºF - do a much better job at immediately conveying how humid the air will feel.
Dark Sky used to show hourly dew point graphs that you could browse throughout the week and see when the humidity would break (or return). Apple Weather does show you the dew point, but only when you select a point on the RH graph. So to track the dew point over the coming week, you basically need to drag your finger over each day's graph and observe the changing numbers.
I think this is probably just due to the lack of general awareness about how dew point is a more elegant shorthand for "absolute humidity" than any other weather metric currently in use. I hope there will be more of us in the future!
14 replies
22h54m
https://weather-sense.leftium.com
My web app plots hourly dew point for the next 24 hours, next 7 days, and past 2 days. (Still WIP.)
Inspired by https://merrysky.net (can also plot dew point), which was inspired by Dark Sky.
5 replies
22h48m
I like your app. I'm planning a trip next week and it was so easy to see the next few days.
4 replies
22h16m
Great! Until UI for setting the location is implemented, you can set the location with the `n` (or `name`) URL parameter like this:
3 replies
21h35m
You seem to know what you are doing, but I have to say that the map's colors make it really hard to see the radar data.
Also the toggle on hover for the day selection is not easy on desktop and very hard on mobile. I'd prefer a simple toggle.
1 replies
21h16m
Thanks for the feedback.
I picked the Watercolor map style[1] because it looked pretty and the detail from other styles wasn't needed (like street names).
Then I picked The Weather Channel radar color scheme[2] because the green-to-red gradients seemed to contrast well with the Watercolor map style.
What map style/radar color scheme combination would you prefer? Perhaps I can make this configurable... (Is there any chance there simply was no precipitation on your map?)
---
I am not sure what you mean by "toggle on hover." Hover is meant to work without any toggling.
The yellow line indicates which stats are currently being shown.
Ideally, when the mouse cursor is over a timeline, it shows the stats for that time. Otherwise the stats for the current condition are shown.
Sometimes the hover is a little buggy; click + dragging on the timeline or click + dragging outside a timeline usually fixes it.
Usually it works better on mobile! If your finger is touching a timeline, that is considered hovering. Otherwise the current stats are shown.
0 replies
20h16m
No there is precipitation on the map. I'd prefer something light or dark, limited to no colors.
The new one is way better. I'd like to see the streets and city names if possible because with just the watercolor I feel like I'm missing infos.
0 replies
20h58m
I updated the app so the map layer is now grayscale.
That should make the colored radar data easier to see!
2 replies
9h16m
This is great! I live in Sacheon, and am now making this my go-to weather app.
1 replies
9h9m
I'm not seeing how to show the past weather.
0 replies
8h35m
By default:
- The past three hours are shown in the 24 hour timeline
- The timelines for the past two days are shown
- (rendered slightly lighter/transparently)
Up to 92 past days can be shown, but this is currently hard-coded[1] and not configurable (yet).
[1]: https://github.com/Leftium/weather-sense/blob/55b505a7efae65...
1 replies
4h44m
Cool. How do I switch it to standard units?
EDIT: NVM, found it. You tap the temperature.
EDIT 2: It really ought to remember the units. 95% of the planet doesn't ever want to see Fahrenheit.
0 replies
4h31m
You can toggle between Fahrenheit and Celsius by tapping any temperature value.
Eventually other unit types will also be implemented. URL params and cookies will also be added for persistence.
Right now, I chose to default to the most "sensible" units:
- Fahrenheit for temperature
- Millimeters per hour for precipitation
WeatherSense is still a work-in-progress!
---
Also: WeatherSense is designed to be used without numbers. Get a feel for the readings by looking at the shape of the plots and comparing to the current/past conditions.
1 replies
20h52m
Excellent app! And I'm sure I'm not the only one to congratulate you in showing past weather - a so obviously useful feature that 99% of all weather apps never have.
0 replies
20h43m
Yes~ I wrote about this over ten years ago: https://blog.leftium.com/2013/12/how-to-display-temperature-...
Sadly, Naver stopped showing the past weather like that.
This was one of the main motivations for creating UltraWeather: https://github.com/Leftium/ultra-weather#readme
UltraWeather was missing some features like AQI and minutely rain predictions (coming soon!) so I made WeatherSense ^^
0 replies
12h34m
The NWS has local forecast graphs with dew point, temp, heat index, etc, but they are a pain to get to.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.7482&lon=-7...
1. Go to https://www.weather.gov/
2. Put your zip code into the Local forecast box.
3. Click the Hourly Weather Forecast graph on the right side.
4. Bookmark it.
5 replies
1d
I too miss the dew point feature. The best replacement for Dark Sky I've found is this 10-day view of Weather Underground that's unfortunately only available on their website—I just bookmark the website on my phone home screen. https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/austin/30.27,-97...
1 replies
22h56m
https://www.windy.com/-Menu/menu?dewpoint
Windy.com to the rescue for dewpoint lovers.
0 replies
22h50m
Dew point is on Wunderground, you have to click the "Customize" button and check the box. And yes, it does remember across visits.
0 replies
22h48m
Carrot weather has dewpoint graphs (depending on source used).
0 replies
1d
They are basically collapsing the weather gov plots into a single graph or two
(weather gov data is open/free, you can pull it down and plot anyway you want)
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...
0 replies
22h51m
that's unfortunately only available on their website
A very old version of their Android app had that view as a 3-day widget for the home screen. Right after it was bought they did a major upgrade and removed a ton of functionality, that widget included.
2 replies
1d1h
Relative Humidity is directly tied to the dew point. Take a look back at the humidity forecast and look right under the humidity percentage. The dew point is there. If you tap a point in the future on the graph of forecast changes, the dew point is also registered there.
0 replies
22h55m
Yes, but what I'd really like to see is a visual graph of the dew point over the course of a day. The graph currently only shows RH%, and the only way to see how the dew point will change over the course of a day is to drag your finger over the RH% graph and watch the dew point number change.
0 replies
22h22m
- Relative humidity is also directly tied to the current temperature. (Warmer air can hold more moisture.)
- The dew point is independent from the temperature, so it is effectively a measure of "absolute humidity."
- While both measurements have their advantages, I find dew point a better indicator of the "mugginess." Also it is easier to estimate the relative humidity given the dew point vs. estimate the dew point given the relative humidity.
- You can compare both here: https://weather-sense.leftium.com (humidity plot disabled, but the value can be checked by hovering.)
0 replies
1d1h
Good idea! I just added humidity to my home screen widget using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squa...
0 replies
1d1h
Here in Houston as well, dew point is as important as temperature and %PoP. Apple Weather suffices for now but I hope it gets richer with the various types of data that are of greater relevance in different regions.
0 replies
18h51m
I'm moving to NYC tomorrow, after spending my entire life on the West Coast.
Thanks for teaching me about dew point (and to the commenters below you for letting me know there's a free Dark Sky clone - merrysky.net - and a dew point graph on Weather Underground)!
14 replies
1d1h
Is DarkSky not an actual weather app?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35268026
Meteorologists seemed to feel that Dark Sky was a graphics processing tool, not a weather app.
---
“Any weather forecast beyond a couple of hours ... depend on supercomputer models that work according to the laws of physics ... But when we talk about Dark Sky, all it was doing was taking the visual input of the radar and extrapolating what was going to happen over the next couple of hours.”
3 replies
23h47m
Is predicting beyond a couple hours all that useful/important?
2 replies
23h23m
For the eclipse, I was using hyperlocal forecasts for the next day (and next two) for planning for which direction to go, where to stay, and where to head the next day.
The morning of the eclipse it was a question of "this town or that town or that other town at this time."
This may be an edge case, but there are certainly times where prediction for a certain time 24h or 48h in advance is useful.
1 replies
22h18m
What were you using for hyperlocal projective forecasts that far in advance?
0 replies
22h8m
Weather app, yr.no (e.g. https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-4235193/United%20States... ) , myradar, and pivotalweather (which gave access to a number of different models). In the case of things that gave maps, it was "look at the location on the map".
It wasn't necessarily "I want to know the weather for this block" but "I want to know the weather for this square mile."
One of the features that I liked in Dark Sky of very old (it was removed well before Apple decided to buy them) was the Lines feature which showed the models that it used. Knowing how to get at and read the models themselves (and asking the weather geek who I work with about the strengths and weaknesses of each model - "well X is good, but it over predicts precipitation and cloud cover within 50 miles of a lake that can produce lake effects, but if you're not near a lake its spot on for...").
2 replies
1d1h
Every time I looked at the animated weather app, I would see the animation start in the past where clouds moved and grew and shrank naturally. As soon as it passed the present moment, the clouds would become fixed shapes and continue on whatever their current vector is. In the visualization there was no attempt to model clouds growing and shrinking. The clouds would suddenly start skidding across the screen.
I've read that is what the underlying precipitation "models" did as well, but obviously can't confirm.
0 replies
1d
Look at windy.com, their cloud prediction works pretty much the same.
0 replies
1d
Yes; they basically just extrapolated from these "rain blobs" on the visualization as the short-term forecast they provided to users. There are some long-since wiped blog posts that provide a bit more context on how they do a little bit of statistical processing of the general forecast model output to help with they "hyper-localization," but the reality is that it was terribly unsophisticated relatively to what is traditionally done in meteorology.
The rain nowcasting feature that Dark Sky popularized is now table stakes in any consumer weather app. There's little value in making these types of forecasts any more complex (e.g. using AI or other contemporary techniques) because they still have egregious and noticeable failure modes. And it's so trivial to make this type of forecast that there is open source software you can easily run to do it [1].
2 replies
1d1h
How does that make it "not a weather app"? This is just dumb gatekeeping.
1 replies
22h15m
I imagine because it operated counter to basic meteorological theory.
The difference is that 15 minute rain forecasts don't need that to be usefully accurate.
A model of equivalent simplicity would be about as accurate as the farmer's almanac for a 10 day forecast.
0 replies
6h25m
It doesn't run counter to meteorological theory. It just doesn't apply sophisticated long term models.
Simpler models are fine for very short term forecasting which is what they were doing.
This is just weather modellers getting annoyed because someone else is showing them up - not with 10 day atmospheric pressure forecast accuracy, which only weather modellers care about - but with "is it going to rain in 2 hours" which normal people really care about.
0 replies
1d
If that's all it took for Dark Sky on the backend to do what it did, then there's even less excuse for the lack of a good replacement in 2024.
0 replies
1d1h
Unlike the meteorologists, darksky actually worked and would tell you when it was about to rain
0 replies
22h35m
Seems like an strawman comparison to me?
Dark Sky's hyper-local weather predictions weren't based on projecting hours into the future. They were based on very small-scale extrapolation and interpolation.
The meteorologists with their supercomputers aren't, to the best of my knowledge, even trying to do that. And Dark Sky wasn't trying to compete with their models, either. For that kind of long-term forecasting, it was simply passing along the forecasts that meteorological services used those models to produce.
0 replies
1d1h
Except it did that and communicated about it better than any other "weather app"
8 replies
1d2h
I actually feel Apple did a decent job gobbling it up and incorporating some of the best features into their native weather app.
Merry Sky is a good homage but I've never evaluated it much for accuracy: https://merrysky.net/forecast/new%20york/us
4 replies
1d1h
I think the most important feature is accuracy. Maybe, Apple Weather is more accurate for other regions, but by my observation it is absolutely not accurate in regards to predicting rain where I live in Southern California. And we don’t even get that much rain.
3 replies
1d1h
It's completely inaccurate with regards to "is it raining right now" in San Diego County. Given that, it's predictions are beyond useless.
I didn't live here when Dark Sky was still good, but Dark Sky was incredibly accurate when I lived in the Bay Area.
2 replies
1d
I didn't live here when Dark Sky was still good, but Dark Sky was incredibly accurate when I lived in the Bay Area.
I'm kind of skeptical about that, given that the Bay Area has relatively poor radar coverage. The local NEXRAD site is near Mt Umunhum south of San Jose and is quite elevated, so the lowest scanning tilt has limited coverage below ~4,000 feet over much of the SF peninsula and into the Golden Gate. The consequence is that shallow maritime convection can be poorly observed by the radar, and you can frequently have low cloud decks that produce noticeable drizzle or light rain (although possibly not greatly accumulating) across the city and surrounding area wihtout seeing anything on radar. Since Dark Sky wasn't much more than re-packaged NEXRAD data, it has a GIGO problem - if the radars don't see rain, Dark Sky won't predict anything for you.
The exception are the large storm systems that come ashore a few times per year in the Winter and Spring. Those systems behave extremely linearly, so they were "easy" for the algorithms that Dark Sky used to process the radar data. That ease of analysis combined with infrequency probably skews the perception that Dark Sky performed well in the Bay Area.
For what it's worth, I was involved in a study that analyzed the performance of several consumer and enterprise products' performance for reporting and forecasting light rain specifically in the Bay Area, and Dark Sky was indistinguishable from other data products that very obviously used raw, unprocessed NEXRAD data.
1 replies
1d
That's great context, thank you.
I think my only response is that my bar for "incredibly accurate" has gotten very, very low, given the performance here where I'm living now.
I obviously haven't done any kind of quantitative analysis, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's genuinely worse than a coin toss.
Oh, I should add that I was living in East Bay closer to Walnut Creek for much of my time there. If I understand your point about the radar coverage correctly, I expect the Oakland hills topology would interact with that limitation somehow?
0 replies
23h41m
I'm pretty sure KMUX is fully unobstructed (no beam blockage) at the lowest scan elevation, but I don't have a graphic or source at my fingertips to confirm that. I don't recall any difference in quality between East Bay and interior up through Walnut Creek and the SF / Golden Gate peninsulas.
1 replies
1d2h
I agree. I couldn't find anything in the OP post that the Apple weather app doesn't currently do and, imo, do in a much more refined way
0 replies
1d1h
I became exasperated with the unreliability of the Apple Weather app. It gave embarrassingly wrong predictions on a frequent basis. Dark Sky was amazing. I resent Apple for killing that very accurate and useful app.
0 replies
1d2h
It screwed Android users over though, no?
4 replies
1d2h
Tangent maybe. But when I used Dark Sky, I and everyone who asked me about the weather and I'd give them data from Dark Sky were always impressed by my accuracy for knowing when it would rain and stop raining. Now I use Carrot with the AccuWeather(sp) api, and it'll be pouring right on top of me, and Carrot tells me "no rain for the hour". Is this just weather getting harder and harder to predict, or is AccuWeather trash, or anyone else find something that seems as accurate as Dark Sky was?
0 replies
21h44m
My former coworker was insufferable about Dark Sky being accurate but I never found that to be the case. Same with his insistence I use Waze to go through random parking lots, only to find our cowokers beat us back from lunch using a sane route but I am digressing.
Where I am big thunderstorms are very common and it can be dry a quarter mile away. It’s a good indicator but I never found Dark Sky, Accuwhatever, or Apple Weather to be accurate with the rain forecast.
0 replies
1d1h
One of the many reasons I pay for Carrot is to get the other, more expensive, data sources. If you do stump up, you get access to the Apple Weather API--what once was Dark Sky--as well as Foreca. I've found both of them to be very accurate based on what Carrot reports.
(For what it's worth, I never used the Dark Sky app directly. I've always consumed it via Carrot or a free API key that Dark Sky used to give out for individual developers.)
0 replies
20h29m
Seemed like more of a gimmick to me.
Many times it would say something like Rain stopping in 10 minutes. Then 8 minutes later… Rain stopping in 15 minutes. On and on as it steadily rained.
0 replies
1d2h
I find the same issues with Apple's weather app. And even Windy's notifications. The only helpful thing is an actual heatmap visualization of rain. That always gives you a lot more context and a better understanding of what's happening and for how long. I actually really love Apple's rain heatmap
2 replies
21h56m
I love data visualization and run https://weathergraph.app - an iOS/Apple watch/mac app that people often praise for getting many weather metrics into one view. Dew point is surprisingly underrated metric that strongly affects how the weather feels like.
It also has a ‘Dark Sky emulation’ mode for everyone who loved the now defunct app.
I use Foreca, which consistently ranks among top 3 services on forecastadvisor.com, and Pirate Weather & Open-Meteo, which are two awesome indie services that access and enrich the best public models.
Here is how it looks like: https://imgur.com/gallery/Rduy7qc
1 replies
21h48m
I just installed your app, and it certainly looks nice.
Is there no way to use the app (with free data sources) at your own location? Right now it appears to choose a random demo location. It’s a pity because I don’t use weather apps that much to justify spending money but I appreciate the app nonetheless.
0 replies
4h51m
Hi, that’s currently right - I am iterating on this, and I might bring back the free mode with limited customization instead of demo location with everything. Thanks for the feedback!
2 replies
1d
I dearly wish Apple would just publish Dark Sky again. Let the Weather app be whatever super clean design hero you want, just give us back this perfect information dense weather app to use day to day.
There have to be dozens of devs in apple who would love to be on the 1-2 person team it would take to maintain it. (It was a 2 person startup for years, don't come at me with how hard stuff is.) It could even be a reward for good service, "ok you successfully mucked around with weird EU privacy law in the health app for 2 years, instead of a sabbatical for therapy how about you get to work on Dark Sky for a year?"
0 replies
1d
Somewhere in Cupertino an Apple UX engineer is furrowing their brow at you.
How dare you want information!
0 replies
22h9m
What good would that be without the information backing it? (The DarkSky API server)
And if that information does still exist in the (public) Apple Weather API, why hasn't anyone (not just some Apple Engineer) just created an app with the views people care about?
2 replies
19h59m
When Apple killed Dark Sky, I ended up with Weather Strip. It does a really good job of giving me the same amount of information density. Possibly even better - one fairly readable graph combines rain probability, temperature, cloudiness, and estimated inches of rain into a single glance. https://www.weatherstrip.app
0 replies
6h34m
There’s also WeatherGraph:
0 replies
19h56m
That looks absolutely terrific. Does anybody know an Android equivalent?
2 replies
1d2h
The one problem it had, that it still has to this day under Apple's reign, is not being able to tell the difference between clear skies and if the precipitation map tiles are still loading.
1 replies
1d1h
if the precipitation map tiles are still loading.
which they seem to do for prolonged periods or won't load at all, no matter the hardware and internet connection (tested on: iPhone 8+, iPhone SE 2020, iPhone 15 Pro - makes no difference)
Most infuriating thing they do (while we're at it): load everything except the area i'm interested in. I can't even...
0 replies
1d1h
Yeah. Given how many iPhones are deployed into the world, I wonder how many people looked at that data visualization and thought, "Clear skies! I guess I'll continue..." and instead headed directly into inclement weather.
2 replies
1d1h
I find it wild that no one has fully replaced Dark Sky, ideally with an outright clone. Both the visualization and the unique "it's about to rain where you are" prediction system. I've tried a lot of clones of the latter and none work nearly as well.
These days I go to windy.com for my weather nerd needs but it's quite different from Dark Sky.
0 replies
1d
The default weather app on my Samsung phone looks an awful lot like Apple's default weather app, but it has a line graph below the hourly temperatures.
I check it a couple times a day, and it's good enough for my needs. My bar's pretty low, though. The weather is rather unpredictable where I live; IME there's really no such thing as an accurate hourly forecast more than ~12 hours out. On Sunday night, today's forecast showed heavy rain and thunderstorms. Currently, it's 85 and there isn't a cloud in the sky. No amount of good dataviz can make up for that.
If you lived somewhere where you might take weather forecast accuracy for granted, I can see why you'd hate Samsung's app. It does the 24-hour hourly forecast and the 10-day daily summary just fine, but that's it. It'll show you current air quality and humidity, but no forecast data for those. Also, if you tap anything to see more details, it just launches an AccuWeather web page.
0 replies
5h20m
I've been using briefsky which is similar to merrysky but open source. Both use pirate weather which is a recreation of the dark sky API. It's not as accurate (and I sometimes also switch briefsky to the tomorrow.io API) but it gives me that familiar UI and fills the role well enough for now.
2 replies
1d2h
Been using Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net) quite happily as a replacement mostly for the layout/quick data viz. Mostly accurate/helpful as Dark Sky was, tho some rare data blackouts when it can't pull the data or whatever, but it's back in a few hours
0 replies
1d1h
Second Merry Sky
0 replies
5h17m
Also check out briefsky. Like merrysky it supports the pirate weather API but it's open source / self hostable (at least I don't see any link to merrysky's source) and it supports several other weather APIs as well. I found switching it to the tomorrow.io API was much more accurate for beach weather.
1 replies
1d1h
Are there any comparisons of weather apps by area? For example, "for the San Francisco bay area, apple weather is most accurate on rain. But for NYC accuweather is better." I suppose you ought to be comparing weather APIs rather than apps but it would be most usable if you just knew which app to download.
0 replies
23h6m
Not really apps, but here's a tool that can do it by forecast data source: https://www.forecastadvisor.com
1 replies
1d2h
After the shutdown of Dark Sky, I switched to Carrot, which added a layout that mimics Dark Sky's design (the layout option is called "Anubis" in the Carrot app). I've found it to be a largely seamless replacement.
0 replies
1d2h
Agree, though there's still something about Carrot's underlying design language that is less subtle and refined. It's a very, very minor complaint given the effort Carrot clearly made (and their evident appreciation for a competitor that did things better for many users' preferences), but there's some weird information processing lag I still experience with Carrot because I'm fighting the UI even though it looks almost identical to DS. In the end, I actually enjoy the experience because (a) it's so minor and (b) it gives me an opportunity to play with how my own brain perceives the universe. So that's fun.
1 replies
1d2h
Weather Line was another beautifully weather app based on Dark Sky I really miss:
0 replies
22h20m
https://weathergraph.app/ is its spiritual successor.
1 replies
1d1h
On a related note, I had to stop using the Apple weather app because it doesn’t even get the current temperature right at my house. Right now, Apple weather is saying it’s 61 degrees and Weather Underground is saying 72.
0 replies
1d1h
Exactly. It’s junk. It can’t even accurately report the current weather.
1 replies
1d
So why not replicate it?
Dark Sky is basically just fancy visualization for csv/json data from a weather API.
0 replies
23h48m
To challenge Dark Sky they have to beat nostalgia, not reality. The default weather app is probably good enough for most people.
1 replies
1d2h
(2023)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115
0 replies
1d
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 - March 2023 (251 comments)
0 replies
23h50m
Here me out: Dark Sky amazingness is why we need to get rid of these tech monopolies
None of this amazing innovation comes from big companies
Now it’s swallowed up, resting and vesting
0 replies
1d2h
Looks cool, but wasn’t available for where I live in Europe, so never got to experience it.
0 replies
1d2h
I always thought Dark Sky had one of the worst UI's on the planet.
0 replies
19h26m
Why do people care about checking the weather in detail so much? Tomorrow it will probably be like today, unless it does/does not precipitate.
0 replies
1d1h
I have never used Dark Sky, although I have to say the Apple Weather app is one of the best I've seen so far (for my area). It works really well and it can often tell weather changes down to the minute.
0 replies
6h52m
I've been using Klara for years, I especially like the detailed daily forecast that shows hourly weather.
0 replies
1d
I don't get it. What is the irreplaceable part? You're all software engineers. Why don't you just write the software you're missing?
I'd do it but I know I don't care about the weather like this. I just ask my voice assistant in broad terms. So I would suck at building it. But you guys all care. Why is it non replicable?
0 replies
1d
Dark Sky was incredible. I could time my out door activity like going for a run or do yard work based on its real time rain alerts down to the minute or two. Haven't found anything that accurate for forecasting. I was really hoping Apple would've merged some of that into their own IOS weather app. But it never happened.
0 replies
1d2h
I used to use darksky a lot, because it reminded me of Back To The Future 2 when it'd do the "done raining in 5 mins". It's a stupid request, but if other services could figure this out along with a cute UI like darksky, I'd be your best friend. Weather sites can have the best info, but if the UI is not good then its much harder to draw conclusions from the stats.
0 replies
1d2h
I like this simplistic presentation of Weather Strip https://www.weatherstrip.app/ I think it builds upon this Wetter for iOS app http://wetter.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php
Wetter is more detailed and complicated to read as compared to Weather Strip but I like the information such as CAPE and pressure info.
0 replies
1d1h
I used to love Dark Sky on android. Finally settled on a using a combination of Breezy Weather and Flowx
0 replies
1d1h
I miss Dark Sky a lot and Apple totally screwed it up. I sponsor the Pirate Weather (https://pirateweather.net/) project which duplicates the Dark Sky API and used it to make my own display: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/04/a-personal-weather-picture-usin...
Pirate Weather is the backend for the Dark Sky-like Merry Sky: https://merrysky.net/
0 replies
1d2h
The Dark Sky blog [1] had a post on their (then-new) app design, and also had many other posts on some details of their weather prediction algorithms and other technical bits. Sadly the blog was deleted after the Apple acquisition, but it is archived on the Wayback Machine. Some good reading!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191210071310/https://blog.dark...
0 replies
23h28m
This is why I have said recently and have gotten massive downvotes: do not sell your company and "exit". The world will become a much better place if you do not plan for an exit, but plan to make a better world.
0 replies
21h45m
Just as the author of this blog, I found Dark Sky UI uniquely concise and informative. I managed to somewhat replace it with not one, but two apps (on Android):
- OpenWeather for a dense, one-page view of short-term upcoming conditions (temperature, precipitation) and the weekly forecast.
- Shadow Weather for extra details: cloud cover, wind directions, etc.
0 replies
1d2h
I've been using flowX for many years, first on android and now on ios. I've found it to be incredibly customisable, and particularly good at visualising incoming weather. Gladly paid for it for years now
0 replies
1d
I actually like the weather gov format, it's how my brain works
put your lat/lon on the end
(google HQ) https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...
(amazon HQ) https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...
The data is open/free, you can pull down the raw data and make it look however you want.
I just wish there was an easy website to get Google's new AI weather which supposedly is far more accurate (only on certain android builds?)
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19h27m
Why is everyone blaming Apple? Your anger should be directed at the authors, who sold their proprietary software and reaped the benefits. This is the dream of most startup entrepreneurs. I'm sure they are quite happy about what happened.
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1d2h
Not quite as feature-rich, but for a similar “shape-based” UI, Weather Strip is fantastic. It provides, IMO, an even clearer picture of the weather than dark sky did.
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23h43m
My "favorite" behavior on the new post-DarkSky Weather app is that each of the phones in the house give different info re the weather directly outside. The worst is my child's phone which has its language set to Mandarin (the only substantive difference between their phone and our phones). Their Weather app is usually way off from our phones. None of the phones match the info given by NWS.
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23h33m
I've never used Dark Sky, but the most innovative weather app/site I've used is definitely Weather Underground. Their radar and 10-day view are second to none.
It does sound like Dark Sky had one useful feature that has no match - analyzing weather radar and sending personalized rain alert push notifications based on your location. That's pretty awesome.
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17h54m
Side note but I've downloaded and tried 10-15 weather apps this week. All I want to do is see the weather for the rest of the day, and then the rest of the week. None of them can really do it. The best ones can give you a few hours of the day (horizontal) and then a couple of days (vertical) (why the format change?). All of them completely waste all of their screen space with useless things like one gigantic temperature icon or just pictures of clouds. Invariably they have all the data you need but it's not considered important enough to put on the screen and you have to scroll.
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7h48m
In Switzerland, many people use the government-develpped weather app (MeteoSwiss). It havs very similar visualizations like DarkSky it seems.
They also have a web interface, if you want to check it out, though the app is better: https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/lokalprognose/zuerich/8001...
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1d
it is so important that somebody stands up to apple fanboization and points out that their UI design is mediocre at best.
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1d2h
The dark sky API was the backbone of several tinkering projects that I built when first getting in to coding. Fond memories and many thanks to the dark sky devs
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1d3h
Dark Sky was their lesser product. Their "lines" interface at forecast.io/lines before they rebranded was peak weather UI, but the internet has almost no record of it ever existing.
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1d2h
The old Weather Underground weather app is another example of an acquisition destroying superb graphics design. Its clarity, information density, and beauty has yet to be matched.
Have you used the latest Weather app? Which DarkSky features is it missing?
The unmatched clarity and simplicity of the data. The Weather app isn't in the same league. To my eye, it's a cluttered, gaudy mess, certainly compared to Dark Sky.
Carrot Weather has a mode that is almost a replacement for Dark Sky, btw, though the location-based alerts have gotten less and less reliable over the years (which I am completely unable to understand).
The blog post does a good job of enumerating the nice interfaces in Dark Sky. But it spends no time comparing them to the equivalents in Weather app. If it did, then the parity of features would become clear, not only in terms of information presented but also user interface.
Also, FWIW this post is from 2023, and the Weather app has improved significantly since then.
For example, the post references a Reddit comment complaining about the lack of a precipitation map:
This is available in Weather app. You can see the hourly graph, and you can also see the map with precipitation overlay.
The notification feature you ask for is also supported.
I repeat my original question: can anyone actually name a feature from DarkSky that isn’t present in the current Weather app?
The Apple Weather app is unreliable.
In fairness to Apple Weather, hyperlocal forecasts have inexplicably gotten far, far worse in the last few years (in my own anecdata anyway).
It feels like quite the coincidence that hyperlocal weather prediction got worse after Dark Sky went away.
But, I don’t have any domain knowledge in this area. Perhaps, it is just more difficult due to climate change or other factors.
I've suspected, without any knowledge/evidence, that the increasing energy in the atmosphere has made all forecasts harder in recent years.
I did notice that Dark Sky's hyperlocal weather was getting bad in my area at the end. I wonder if it has anything to do with 5G frequency rollouts. I had seen some warnings about accurate weather predictions could be affected by it, but a quick search isn't showing any "Turns out 5G is/is not messing with our weather satellites" follow-up articles
Interestingly, COVID played a big roll in that. Commercial aircraft often report back weather conditions. During COVID, the reduction in commercial air traffic drastically reduced air borne information collection. It just hasn’t seemed to return to its prior quality after that.
I personally find, I’ve had to learn how to read a weather map to get a good understanding of forecasts
Is this done via some automated system, or do pilots report it manually?
I’d be curious to read more about this - do weather companies have partnerships with airlines where they pay them to carry sensors?
Pretty sure it's all automated. Aircraft already have all of the necessary sensors onboard, so it's just a matter of transmitting it back to the ground.
Nearly all of the US's forecasts come from the NOAA. Nearly every other "weather company" is simply reformatting this data.
I can't remember exactly what video I watched on the topic, but these two may be interesting:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-wvE3iXT-A
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U
Hyperlocal forecasts are an aggregate of other weather sources and radar.
Things like the funding of NOAA or reallocation of funds within it can impact NOAA's ability to provide the data that is used to drive this (and other) weather and climate decisions. https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2024/04/30/noaas-budge...
I remember darksky used to seed me notifications that were something like “Rain in your location starting in 2 minutes.” You could almost set a timer based on it. 2 minutes later it would be raining. It was super helpful when doing things outside with the family. If the current weather app can do this, I don’t know how.
Click the settings hamburger (a universally recognized icon on iOS, and one of only two buttons on the main page of the Weather app). Then there is a prominent banner that says “Stay Informed: Get notifications for severe weather, rain or snow near you.” Once you enable this, you can then configure the alerts to include severe weather, or simply rain in the next hour.
For anyone else struggling to find it with these instructions: I had to choose a location (I have a few added), then scroll all the way to the bottom (past averages, past "Report an Issue") and there's an easily-overlooked "Manage Notifications" button.
I had turned mine off, probably from way back when I used Dark Sky and didn't want redundant notifications.
Weird, for me it’s in the corner in a sticky footer. I’m on iOS 17.6 and iPhone 15 Pro.
Just realized there's an iOS update - it hadn't notified me yet. I'm on an iPhone 14, but still running 17.5.1 for the next few minutes..
From Weather app and MyRadar last night - https://imgur.com/a/EnEXCGD
As others have already mentioned, the fact that it displayed weather information in a clear and uncluttered way, and had a simple user interface. Apple Weather is a gaudy mess.
Easy. As the screenshots show, the DarkSky main page would _dynamically adjust_ the information it shows you: adding radar, precip level, combined precip/temperature forcecast, etc. The fact that those elements can be found individually by poking through three or four screens in the Weather app doesn't make them equivalent.
It is cluttered and messy. Or, if you prefer, it does not have the feature of thoughtful information design that was a primary factor in Dark Sky's success, in favor of cartoonish and distracting animations and cluttered layout. The presence of information or functionality is not the only factor in success. (If it were, the Diamond Rio would be more iconic than the iPod, because it could arguably do more, though sometimes with less capacity given the timing.)
Weather history/future. Currently you can look 1 day in the past in Apple Weather. Dark Sky allowed you to look years into the past. Dark Sky also allowed you to look more than 10/14 days into the future. It used historical averages to show you for a specific day instead of some fancy prediction, but it was nice to have.
There was also a "Check out Cool Storms" feature that let you see the weather map for an interesting storm that was happening at the moment.
Notifications were also more configurable. You could set it to notify you if the precipitation chance were higher than a certain percentage or if the high were below or above a certain temp.
I agree with you in that no other app has comparable data to the weather data that Dark Sky had and the layout was amazing. Yes someones comment that the weather app has more features but its the quality of the features that are missing.
I sometimes think that the reason Dark Sky was so good is that it spent a lot of money on the data side of things and probably refreshed their data and models much more than a larger company would. They were probably burning their money quite fast. As a function of the acquisition Apple tried to reduce the spend on data/processing while keeping the functions (it didn't succeed). Weather app has the same problem.
All in all - seems like a well traveled road: nimble company trying to acquire new customers/market has better features until large companies take over and drive profit/revenue - diluting quality and pushing away customers. (different incentives)
I feel like people obsess over Dark Sky because it would have slotted almost unchanged into some hypothetical post-Mac OS 9 design language if "lickable" OS X had never existed. Or, if you prefer, Dark Sky embodied the engineered simplicity and power that made people so loyal to the earliest Apple GUI software in favor of the more, uh, ebullient character that has driven the last 20 years of Apple UI design (sic). Note that I still put Apple's UI design well ahead of both Android and Microsoft, but it has regressed substantially.
% cloud cover by hour
You’re right, this one is missing. Although I’m skeptical of the utility (and accuracy) of something as precise as “percentage of cloud cover,” compared to what is available in the app, namely “clear, cloudy, mostly sunny, etc.”
Is there a meaningful difference between 25% cloud cover and 35%? Or is it better to just give names to the “conditions” at buckets of 25%, 50%, 75%, etc?
At the fringes, there is a meaningful difference. The center 50%, not really.
A 95% coverage day is a bit different than a 100% coverage day. Particularly, when it comes to rain and wind expectations.
How is that difference meaningful? What actions are you going to take differently at 95% cloud coverage vs 100%? I can't think of anything I'd do differently if I was expecting 100% cloud coverage tomorrow to wake up and find that it was actually at 95%.
Yeah, and I’d argue that if the difference is meaningful to you, then you probably want something more accurate than what a consumer-grade weather service can provide. So it would be borderline irresponsible of Apple to even give you the false confidence of some precise measurement of cloud cover.
I would expect certain segments of aviation to find the additional granularity critical.
Presumably they shouldn’t be using a consumer weather service and mobile app.
The best cloud cover that I've found is yr.no
For example (and it always takes a bit for me to find it) https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-4887398/United%20States... (and https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-4887398/United%20States... )
And here's their API - https://developer.yr.no/featured-products/forecast/
It breaks it down by overall, low, medium, and high clouds.
in my experience its more like: 0-5% - Sunny; 5-60% - Partly Cloudy; 60-100% - Cloudy;
I've not seen other descriptors, and to view it changing over time its just on the timeline as a sun, sun+cloud & cloud emoji's
It's not useful other than as a binary 'is it cloudy' which in Bay Area weather it is a meaningful difference between 30% and 60% coverage
The biggest thing I find Weather to be missing is hyperlocal & timely accuracy.
While I understand the UI complaints others have, for the handful of things I normally want to see I find Weather fine enough vs Dark Sky. BUT, the accuracy took a noticeable downward trend.
Assuming this is true, why did it happen? Presumably Apple is using the same data feeds and backend as Dark Sky? Or are they missing something?
From using the Apple Weather app, I didn’t get the feeling that Apple Weather actually adopted much of the guts of Dark Sky, even though Apple promised to do so.
I don't think that's a safe assumption. The effect was immediate and noticeable. I've seen other posts in this thread after I said this that suggested this was a cost savings measure.
Weather has hyperlocal precipitation alerts.
I don't believe Weather or Dark Sky have had hyperlocal weather forecasting. I would absolutely love such a feature (since I live far from the center of town in an area with microclimates); I would say both were equivalently faulty on my weather forecasts.
If I wanted to see the heat index at 3PM in Dark Sky, I could just tap the "feels like" button under the hourly forecast (pictured further down in the linked blog post) and look at what it says at 3PM.
I just tried in Apple Weather, and the process was:
1. Tap on the hourly forecast, or the day, to go into the graph screen
2. Tap on the dropdown icon
3. Tap "feels like"
4. Either drag your finger along the graph until the time indicator at the top indicates you're close to 3PM, then read the temperature, or you can try to read it directly off the graph, but the axes aren't labeled clearly enough to make this feasible
Why would you need degree-perfect precision in a subjective measurement? Eyeball it. It’ll feel like around 90ish. Or it’ll feel like around 85ish. There’s no reason for an indication that it’ll feel 87.500.
You only need to cross-navigate detail views (via the drop-down) if you start by looking at some other piece of information.
1. Scroll to the "Feels Like" tile
2. Tap it
There's a link at the top of this comment section that goes over it.
That’s a link to a discussion from March 2023. My question is about which features are missing from the latest Weather app, after more than a year of improvement.
Weather app is not accurate and its slow.
The features may be there but they aren't well implemented.
Diluted for the masses.
With DarkSky, you used to be able to report current weather conditions. Augmenting weather modeling from sensors with real-time reports from users is critical for high levels of accuracy. Somehow this seems to have been completely overlooked in the integration with Apple's weather app.
You can do this in the Weather app. Click “report an issue” and it asks you to report current conditions in your area.
Admittedly this information is not surfaced in any way like “other users say it’s raining.” And “report an issue” isn’t a great name. But it does say they incorporate user reports into their data.
It's crap. No offense intended if you are on the team maintaining Apple Weather, but the interface is much more busy than DarkSky was and there is a lot less clarity and simplicity in how weather information is displayed. My impression is that the quality of the forecasts is also not as good, but that might just be my personal bias.
The fact that Apple chose to shut down one of the best apps on the iPhone in order to promote Apple Weather is still really irritating. I keep Darksky in the app graveyard on my phone, next to Apollo.
It doesn’t seem to be nearly as accurate. I’ve abandoned the Apple Weather app in favor of The Weather Channel App, because the former seemed unreliable to me.
The feature where it tells me the weather.
I'd say there's about a 80% chance that it loads the forecast in under 5 seconds.
Loading the radar has far worse performance - it only works ~50% of the time and failures just show an empty map forever.
When it does manage to load the weather I've found the accuracy to be hot garbage.
Weather app is no where near as accurate and its slow (especially on any radar work). The features may be there but they aren't well implemented.
The first year of the new weather app they didn't even give you hourly precipitation chance throughout the day. If I had to pick what were the two key features of Dark Sky it would be 1) impending rain notifications, and 2) hourly precipitation chances.
It's included now, but still not as well as Dark Sky did it.
For an app not trying to reproduce Dark Sky, but doing a nice job with an overview of the day's weather, I've been using Overlook. But now I'm seeing that its app store listing is gone. https://apps.apple.com/app/overlook-weather/id1639571738
I’ve been using Carrot. Okay but also not as good.
Plus a very expensive (relatively) subscription. I loved Dark Sky because I bought it and then I had it.
I'm fond of MyRadar. https://myradar.com
While the radar view is nice, the outlook view is very nice.
From a screen shot of the screen shot in the App Store: https://imgur.com/a/U8o1DJw and my own outlook
The 'ring' data view at the top (and bottom of the second image) is a nice way to represent the data in a limited amount of space (phone / watch widgets).
I do hate this about so many weather apps:
Ongoing customer value (hyper-local precipitation forecasts) that has ongoing costs for the developer (weather data) is unsustainable without ongoing revenue (subscriptions). This may have had a thing or two to do with Dark Sky ending in an acquihire.
There’s RainAlarm which achieves a similar feature by downloading (freely available) radar imagery and notifying you when the rain echoes are nearby. Worked pretty well when I used this a few years ago. (I’ve now moved to a country where Apple’s rain warnings are pretty accurate.)
https://rain-alarm.com
Carrot added a linear forecast view, which is very close to the Dark Sky interface and it's been great.
Which view do you mean? I was a longtime Dark Sky user, and now I switch between Carrot and Apple Weather.
To put it gently, Apple destroyed a fantastically valuable piece of software and made my life worse. Since then, Apple has failed to come close to offering in their weather app what DarkSky offered for years prior.
Besides the API, besides the hyper-local (and, in my experience, _always_ accurate) forecasts, besides the excellent visualizations, besides the nice web app, what I miss most was the history.
I loved the history. It was perhaps DarkSky's least appreciated feature.
You could search (at least within the US) for any date in the past few decades, and find the temperature and precipitation and whatnot for a given location.
You could see what the weather was like on those important dates in your life. You could see what the weather was like the day after those important dates in your life.
It's a little bit of memory that's been excised from the commons. It still makes me sad.
As a motorcycle rider and someone who goes top-down in my Jeep all summer, the real-time incoming rain alerts of DS were freakishly accurate and I leaned on them constantly. Apple integrated the feature and they became comically inaccurate. (The opposite of an accurate rain forecast is not great.) After getting soaked one too many times, I finally got frustrated enough to chase down the best replacement. Don't love Carrot Weather near as much, but it is the best alternative I've found for heads up on incoming precipitation. Sigh. I still remember the days of getting a "moderate rain starting in 13 minutes" alert and hoping on the bike and zipping home in time. Don't know how they did it so well.
Any clue why? Did broadening the pool of reporting devices from Dark Sky users to the general iPhone population somehow break their models?
It limited it-- DarkSky was on Android and iOS before Apple killed the service.
But IIRC, DarkSky stopped using phones altogether some time before Apple killed the service. I can't find a source on that given Apple also deleted DarkSky's blog, so, grain of salt.
As a fellow naked-Jeep-fan, I've been perplexed and depressed by Apple's handling of it. A couple of weeks ago, we had a thunderstorm roll through, which dropped the local temperature by ~15 degrees F, but my Apple devices kept insisting the current weather was 90º. Maddening.
This was almost my experience exactly. I used DarkSky as a grad student with a twenty minute bike commute and responsibilities all over a large campus. Without fail, DarkSky kept me dry. (Or, at least allowed me to avoid the worst of it.)
Yes! The history! Why such an obviously useful feature isn't in all weather apps, I shall never know. Along with the usage you mention, I was always wanting to know at least what the temperature was yesterday so that I could work out what to wear or do today.
I'd go as far to say that the absence of past weather data in most weather apps is symbolic of the wider state of design today. Anyone with any real design knowledge, any basic capacity to synthesize argument or think about problems, would find it obvious that showing past weather is useful because it provides context. So many statistical apps (so-called "dashboards") are such drek because of this too.
Something changed before Apple even bought it. It was not nearly as accurate by the time Apple bought it. I do still miss the app, but the data or the algorithm changed before the purchase.
i noticed the same exact thing. i thought weather had been solved with dark sky. then at some point something got messed up. i would love to know the full story behind this.
As an Android user who had a Dark Sky subscription, I have a similar sentiment.
Today Weather has precipitation alters and its UI is, IMO, better than that of Dark Sky. If you're looking for a free app there is also Weawow. Both allow the use of Apple's weather data.
Same. If Apple had any sense they would have just slapped an Apple logo on Dark Sky and called it the new weather app, then used it to influence their core design language throughout the rest of the OS.
I’m using the weather app now, but am still longing for the spiritual successor to Dark Sky.
I had a similar feeling when Google bought and killed Sparrow. They should have simply replaced the Gmail app with Sparrow, instead, they killed the only email client I ever genuinely enjoyed using.
I feel like I wrote this lol. I couldn’t agree more with every aspect of your comment. The loss of Sparrow was a sad day, only to be topped with how Apple handled DarkSky.
100000%
No excuse to not just buy Dark Sky and let them continue unburdened by corporate politics
Honestly, thinking that Apple will ever give a damn about individual apps is like expectin a cat to learn calculus.
this...every time i use the damn apple weather app i am reminded how much i miss dark sky and my contempt is rekindled. makes me wonder how often this sort of tragedy happens.
It's unlikely there were enough paying customers to pay the bills, especially compute; and Dark Sky willingly exited.