May
6
2013

Today Weather Gets Dark Sky Alerts, Forecast.io Support

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Today Weather

Savvy Apps’ Today Weather, my favorite iOS weather app, has been updated today to include support for Dark Sky alerts and Forecast.io, the Dark Sky Company’s recently launched weather service that comes with an API for third-party developers. Available as a $0.99 In-App Purchase, support for Forecast won’t turn Today Weather into an interface for Forecast Lines (another product from the Dark Sky Company, focused on displaying weather trends), but instead it’ll simply enable Forecast.io as a new weather source alongside Weather Underground.

While the Dark Sky iPhone app is primarily limited to North America, Forecast.io is a global weather service that aggregates data (temperature, pressure, forecasts, etc.) from various sources, statistically providing “the most accurate forecast possible for a given location”. I have been testing Today Weather with Forecast.io for the past month, and results were more accurate than Weather Underground for the Italian locations I tried: Viterbo (where I live), Montalto di Castro, and Rome. Weather Underground has been reliable in the past, but Forecast.io data had a series of minor differences that, eventually, proved to be true; admittedly, it wasn’t a major divergence in terms of temperatures and forecasts, but still accurate.

Dark Sky alerts are equally interesting: sitting in the top right corner of a location’s summary veiw, they provide a handy summary for Now, Next Hour, Next 3 Hours, and “Today and Upcoming” forecasts. I am a fan of Dark Sky’s human-readable text summaries, but, alas, temperatures haven’t been localized to Celsius (I believe this is a Dark Sky API limitation), and, at least for my saved locations, there’s not much information available for Next Hour and Next 3 Hours. I am sure that, for countries with better availability of weather tracking services and data providers, Today Weather’s Dark Sky alerts will offer even better summaries.

I like Today Weather and I’m a fan of The Dark Sky Company’s work on Dark Sky and Forecast. The $0.99 In-App Purchase is a no-brainer if you want to try Forecast.io’s data into Savvy Apps’ solid weather client.

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→ Today Weather 1.2 Goes Universal

Today Weather 1.2 Goes Universal

Today Weather

Today Weather is my go-to weather app for iPhone – the one I keep on my Home screen – and with the 1.2 version released today, the app has gone Universal adding iPad support.

Those coming from Today Weather for iPhone will instantly be familiar with the iPad app. All the features of the iPhone counterpart have been ported to the iPad, keeping the navigation consistent across versions, but using the iPad's larger screen to offer more information. My favorite feature of Today Weather was the Forecast view:

What I like the most about Today Weather is the screen on the left. Called Forecast view, it comes with a normal and “geek” mode to visualize temperature and weather for the next week. Unsurprisingly, I like geek mode, which is enabled by tapping on the screen: with a set of vertical bars, the graph displays high and low temperatures for the week using the NOAA color gradients. Normal mode simply displays the highest value, and you can switch between the two with a tap. In doing so you’ll notice the nice animation that brings up the bars one after the other. It’s a fantastic touch. Forecast view is the screen I’ve been checking out every day because I like to know, in simple terms, “what the next days will be like”. Today Weather provides that kind of information in three ways: data (numbers), icons, and colors.

On the iPad, Forecast has two extra days, spanning more than a week worth of visual forecasts. It is, by far, my most used feature in Today Weather.

The initial screen has been reworked for the iPad. Instead of presenting multiple locations stacked on top of each other, Today Weather for iPad offers a Dashboard view that takes up the entire screen and lays out the same information with a design that feels more native to the iPad. I really like this idea as it lets me quickly fire up Today Weather and understand in a few seconds what the weather is going to be like in those 5-6 locations that I care about – without having to scroll or drilling down into their detailed views.

Today Weather is $0.99, Universal, and I highly recommend it.

Posted by Federico Viticci on – ∞
Dec
12
2012

Today Weather

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As I’ve written many times here on MacStories, I’m no weather expert. I’ve used Apple’s Weather app for years, until I figured that I wanted just a little more stats and a different interface to check on forecasts and current conditions. Still, I don’t need a complex weather app with terminology I would need a dictionary for. That’s why for the past few weeks I’ve been using Check The Weather and liked its simple approach to weather data presentation.

Today Weather is a new app by Savvy Apps – creators of some of our favorite iOS apps like Agenda and Buzz Contacts – that, while similar to Check The Weather on the surface, is actually more reminiscent of Agenda. (more…)

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