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Posts tagged with "weather"

CARROT Weather Adds Powerful, Redesigned Apple Watch App

Version 4.3 of CARROT Weather for iOS launched today, bringing a ground-up redesign of its Apple Watch app that offers power and flexibility in a beautifully designed package.

CARROT Weather’s story isn’t that it had an old, out-dated Apple Watch app that’s now finally become modern. Instead, today’s update takes what was already a very good Watch app and replaces it with a great one.

Before this big redesign, CARROT’s Watch app was already fast and flexible, with an assortment of customization options for things like complications. It even worked well when your Watch was running solo; by contrast, most third-party Watch apps depend entirely on a paired iPhone and can’t function at all when untethered from the device. CARROT’s new Watch app keeps all these positives, improves upon them, and adds a lot more to the package.

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CARROT Weather Adds New CARROT Voices, Weather Underground Improvements, and More

Within a matter of a few months, CARROT Weather has launched a major new version, then followed up with a fun AR mode, and now with version 4.2, it’s adding several key refinements to improve the overall experience.

CARROT’s snarky personality is the defining characteristic of the app, yet recent updates have seen that personality gain customization options – both for users wanting more snark, and those begging for less. With today’s update, CARROT goes through perhaps an even more drastic transformation. From the Personality screen in Settings, there are now a variety of new voices that can be set for CARROT, including both female and male options. Among these is FRED, the voice used for the original Mac. My personal favorite is JEEVES, whose smug butler tone makes me feel inferior in a way I thought only the original CARROT could.

Users of CARROT Weather’s alternative data source, Weather Underground, get a couple nice updates in this release. Now, available weather stations can be seen and selected from a map view, making it much easier to get the absolute most accurate data for your current location. Also, severe weather alerts are now available for all of Europe so you’ll be kept in the know regarding official hazards.

If you prefer your weather app to provide a little more business, a little less party, CARROT’s Professional mode has been enhanced in a couple ways. Not only will the maniacal A.I. be de-snarked when set to Professional, but now the little characters and animals in illustrations will be hidden by default as well, AR mode will present a more civilized CARROT, and secret locations can now be turned on.

Premium subscribers have a new vertical view option for daily weather info, which can be accessed from Settings ⇾ iPhone/iPad ⇾ Daily ⇾ Details. I’ve found that I prefer the vertical view over the default horizontal, and I enjoy how it still fits right in with the setting of a landscape – when details slide up from the bottom, it feels like you’re simply delving deeper below the surface.

CARROT Weather keeps getting better. The additions in version 4.2 aren’t blockbuster features, but they make for an overall more complete package. Now users with all kinds of weather and personality preferences can benefit from this top-notch app and customize it to their liking. Without losing its distinct sense of flare, CARROT Weather is quickly becoming a weather app for everyone.

CARROT Weather is available on the App Store.

Weather Atlas: Weather Mapping for a Modern Day

One of the app categories that’s always receiving new entries – and that I’m always pleased to try a new take on – is weather. Often weather apps share the same data sources, but their design and customization options make them stand out. The developers at Contrast are no strangers to the crowded weather app market, as creators of the now-retired Perfect Weather. But with the help of developer Greg Pierce, Contrast is introducing a fresh take on the modern weather app with Weather Atlas.

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Weather Line Update Adds Today Widget and 3D Touch Quick Actions

Weather Line, one of my favorite iPhone weather apps, received its first update in some time today. Version 1.8 adds a Today widget, 3D Touch quick actions, plus bug fixes and design refinements.

Weather Line displays hourly, daily, and monthly high and low temperatures and predicted conditions as a graph at the top of the screen. Additional weather data supplied by darksky.net and a panel that can be pulled up to show any short-term predicted precipitation are available on the bottom of each screen. You can choose among the weather for your current location and any cities saved in the app by swiping left and right among them.

Weather Line has come in handy time and again, living in a city like Chicago where the temperature can change dramatically from hour to hour. That’s why I was happy to see the app add a Today widget. The widget displays a graph of the current and projected temperatures and conditions for your current location for the next ten hours. As with all widgets, Weather Line’s has a compact and expanded mode. I prefer the expanded mode, which gives the graphs more vertical space to visually communicate temperature changes, although collapsing the widget is a good way to save space for other widgets.

Weather Line has also added 3D Touch quick actions to its Home screen icon. If you have an iPhone that supports quick actions, pressing on the app’s icon displays the same widget, as well as shortcuts to the hourly and daily conditions for your current location and the weather for the two cities at the top of your saved locations list.

Weather Line quick actions and the widget expanded and collapsed.

Weather Line quick actions and the widget expanded and collapsed.

The update to Weather Line includes several other small tweaks. For instance, the app now uses the San Francisco typeface, which makes text pop a little more on each screen. Also, navigating between cities can now be accomplished by swiping anywhere on the screen, except in the hourly view where swiping left and right on the graph scrolls it horizontally. Previously, you couldn’t swipe on any of the graphs to switch locations. Location search has also been improved.

I’ve always relied on multiple weather apps for different circumstances. The clean, simple design of Weather Line has a timelessness that has kept it fresh and among my favorites despite infrequent updates. Nonetheless, it’s good to see Weather Line expand into widgets and 3D Touch, which make it easier than ever to access its graphs. I would love to see the app’s reach extended even further to the Apple Watch and iPad in coming updates.

Weather Line 1.8 is a free update to existing customers and is available to new customers on the App Store for $2.99.

Weather Line Updated for iOS 8, iPhone 6

I first reviewed Weather Line in October 2013. As I wrote:

I see Weather Line as a combination of a casual weather app for the average user like me and a more advanced solution for the data nerd who wants to know numbers and other weather stats. By sitting somewhere in the middle of these two categories, Weather Line can appeal to both kinds of users thanks to its simple but effective design that uses a line to contextualize forecasts. I have been using Weather Line alongside Apple’s Weather, Yahoo Weather, and Today, and, while I still can’t settle on just one weather app, I have been enjoying Weather Line’s design and presentation.

Weather Line was last updated in November 2013, but, like many others, I kept using it throughout 2014 in spite of its lack of support for iOS 8 and the latest iPhones. Weather Line’s visualization of forecasts and temperature was just too good and its simplicity was unparalleled.

I’m happy to see that Weather Line is back with an update that properly supports iOS 8, the latest iPhone generation, and extended forecasts with more data. Weather Line was one of the first iOS 7 apps to truly take advantage of color in its interface to display different sets of information, and the app still looks and works great.

$1.99 on the App Store, and currently on sale. Recommended.

Horizon 3: Calendar + Weather

Originally released in early 2013, Horizon was a calendar app developed by Kyle Rosenbluth that integrated local weather forecasts with your calendar, giving you a more contextual representation of events that contained location information. Today, Horizon 3 has been released on the App Store with a brand new design, support for natural language searches, and a timeline view that still displays your upcoming events alongside weather conditions and locations.

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iOS 8 and The Weather Channel→

Kara Swisher, writing at Re/Code about a data provider change in the Weather app for iOS 8:

To convince Apple to make the shift and cut Yahoo out of the middle, the Weather Channel added a lot more technology and information to the offering that it does not provide to Yahoo. That includes more weather specificity related to the location of a user, a nine-day forecast (up from five), a weather-conditions summary and more.

Over the past year, I’ve been using two weather apps on my iPhone: Weather Line and Apple’s Weather app. While I like Weather Line for its visualization of temperature changes, I find the default Weather app a good enough all-in-one solution (unlike others, I can’t enjoy the benefits of Dark Sky alerts here, otherwise I’d install it).

The changes provided by The Weather Channel appear to be ultimately best for the majority of iOS users, and, in my tests with the iOS 8 beta, the summary integrated in Notification Center has been accurate and useful. It seems that Apple is making a good move, and I’m also excited about the idea of third-party apps offering their own weather summary widgets for Notification Center (in my case, national and local services).

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