14 ms·

A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

• LachlanWaffles 4y ago
  I think it was even HN that put me onto https://merrysky.net/ https://merrysky.net/ but it's definitely a good attempt at carrying on the legacy
• uneekname 4y ago
  Oh man I miss Dark Sky. I have yet to find a weather app as good. briefsky[0] was recently posted on here and I think I'll try using it for a while. Also of note is Pirate Weather[1], a weather API in the same style as Dark Sky. [0] https://briefsky.app/ https://briefsky.app/ [1] https://pirateweather.net https://pirateweather.net
  • _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
    Also Merry Sky[1], which uses the Pirate Weather API. Open-Meteo is also interesting. [1]: https://merrysky.net https://merrysky.net [2]: https://open-meteo.com https://open-meteo.com
    • flkiwi 4y ago
      MerrySky is so good. Geometric Weather is a fantastic app with the same look and feel. Carrot Weather also just (?) added what is effectively a "DarkSky mode". It's lovely.
      • _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
        Geometric Weather looks good, but I'm not crazy about its Accuweather backend. One newish app that's good (though it unfortunately doesn't have a status bar weather indicator) is omWeather[1], and it uses Open-Meteo as its backend. [1]: https://github.com/woheller69/omweather https://github.com/woheller69/omweather
  • arprocter 4y ago
    Thanks - briefsky looks the part, although it's disappointing there's no map
  • ChrisArchitect 4y ago
    Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net/ https://merrysky.net/) has replaced Dark Sky for me, a homescreen link to the website and it's doing a good job for at a glance weather and 'feels like' lookups.
  • simon_weber 4y ago
    briefsky is what I switched to. I found the Open-Meteo feels-like numbers to be way off in NYC but Pirate Weather has been fine.
• ezfe 4y ago
  The second complaint mentioned in the article: >Is there anything that has the precipitation graph similar to dark sky The precipitation graph is in the Weather app, so it's unclear why this is being included as a complaint about the Weather app?
  • vngzs 4y ago
    To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph. Then you need to click the thermostat icon and switch it to precipitation. Only then is the information displayed. Once it's onscreen, the precipitation graph in the Apple Weather app centers on the full day view (with the current time in the middle) rather than just the future, which is what most users care about. That's not the same as putting it front-and-center. Yes, the information is there, but the interface design is garbage.
    • doctoboggan 4y ago
      If rain is forecast in the next hour they put the minute by minute graph at the top front and center in the iOS weather app.
      • phailhaus 4y ago
        Not good enough. I'm going to be out for the whole day: do I need an umbrella? I want to know that immediately. It's such basic information that it needs to be always at hand.
        • doctoboggan 4y ago
          The app also tells you that. For example at the top of the app now I see a message “Rainy conditions expected around 3pm”
          • skadamat 4y ago
            Author here! There's definitely a taste / opinion component to any deep design critique. I think for many (for whom the post resonated), the ability to quickly glance at Dark Sky and understand relevant weather contextually was THE game changer. It's a hard thing to discuss, because until you've felt the experience, it doesn't seem like a "big deal". Some apps do use text to talk about the current / upcoming rain, but showing it visually makes it even easier. The ease of use is important because weather apps aren't meant to be that interactive (like a game). They're meant to be context-sensitive information graphics that let you drop in and out very very quickly. http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#inferring_context_from_the_environment http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#inferring_context_from_the_e...
• mattyokan 4y ago
  I really miss Dark Sky. Apple choosing to kill the app was a huge mistake IMO. Despite them "integrating Dark Sky features" into Apple Weather, I still dislike the user interface and layout of Apple Weather in general. Dark Sky was everything I needed for weather. Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
  • bmitc 4y ago
    I agree that killing off the standalone app was a mistake. It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared. > Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen. Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? It seems to me that their usual mode of operation is to completely ignore feedback, and then after a decade or so, they come back with some portion of it and act like it's a thing they completely invented.
    • dwaite 4y ago
      > It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared. Didn't they give two year's notice? > Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? Is there an instance of them taking a decade? Five years, for sure. See butterfly keyboards - people could hate it, it could have more widely reported failures but they can't replace it without revising the whole laptop's design (which they do every five years).
• misnome 4y ago
  I really liked Dark Sky for the notifications and rain intensity charts. But for me in the central UK the map _never_ worked properly for me. Only fragments of the map would load, for some of the time range, and the extrapolation parts never worked properly. Unfortunately the new apple weather version seems to have inherited exactly the same map flaws.
• cryptoz 4y ago
  Well, this is quite a detailed analysis and I don't want to take a dump on it because it's obviously a good analysis. BUT. Masterpiece? I don't think so. Dark Sky's data visualization was all shiny gold and not enough real science. Their radar map with all those pretty colors was super buggy, so much so that you couldn't trust it. If you move the map or zoom in, or pan around, the rain / radar data often would not move with the map. So you would have a 2x scaling issue with how large the rain area was. Also, they never provided confidence information. They often made predictions that were wrong, and never informed you of how confident their forecasts were. But they would always show a 'flawless' representation of the data so you would be convinced it was right. Yes yes, it was pretty. But it was not backed by science, and the data was misrepresented I'd say 100% of the time. You can't have a masterpiece of data visualization where a major component of the vis is 'looking pretty' and the factualness of it is ignored.
  • trefoiled 4y ago
    It's interesting reading this comment, because this perfectly aligns with my experience using the app on Android back before Apple shut it down. I agree with all of the article's points on how intuitive and helpful the UI was, and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement. But the predictions were constantly wrong.
  • evilotto 4y ago
    Meteorologists seemed to feel that Dark Sky was a graphics processing tool, not a weather app. https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/dark-sky-weather-app-apple-meteorologists-rip.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/dark-sky-weather-app-ap...
• acomjean 4y ago
  It has some similarity to the weather overview graphs from weather.gov which are my daily driver. Its just stacked graphs of temperature, humidity, wind, and precipitations for 2 days. Shows sunrise/sunset. Its so not pretty, but quite effective. It took a few days, but I got quite good at reading the weather from these graphs at a glance. https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3761&lon=-71.1185&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3761&lon=-7...
• strict9 4y ago
  It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items. The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult. I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparable. I feel like I lost a friend that I consulted with daily.
  • jwestbury 4y ago
    Can I just piggyback on this to shit on the iOS Weather app for a moment? Whoever designed it doesn't understand the concept of daily max/min temperatures, and the daily low presented in the app is the lowest during that calendar day, rather than the forecast overnight low following the day. It drives me absolutely mad, because I can never reliably determine how cold it will get overnight without going into the hourly view (and even that could be inaccurate for fast-moving weather systems).
    • SkyPuncher 4y ago
      Oh, that drives me insane. It makes it absolutely useless for figuring out how to dress for outdoor activities.
    • athenot 4y ago
      They did the same for the weather on the Apple Watch. It used to show the next minimum temperature but sometime last year it changed to minimum within calendar day, which is just about useless.
      • 0xfaded 4y ago
        To be fair it's only useless 50% of the time
        • schiffern 4y ago
          If it's useless 50% of the time, it's untrustworthy 100% of the time.
• egypturnash 4y ago
  I have moved from Dark Sky to Weather Strip: https://www.weatherstrip.app https://www.weatherstrip.app It does a really nice job of showing me most of what Dark Sky showed, in a similarly easy-to-glance-at format once I spent a little time learning to read its graphs. I think Carrot Weather has a lot of graphs directly ripped off from Dark Sky but the constant attempts to upsell me to a subscription plan while I was playing with it really turned me off, as did the "what political alignment would you like the sweary forecast to have" switch.
  • leokennis 4y ago
    I’m a big fan of https://weathergraph.app https://weathergraph.app since the Pebble days. It’s the same concept, but if I’m honest better designed than Weather Strip.
  • dczot 4y ago
    Nice thanks for the iOS rec. I've been a big fan of FlowX (https://flowx.io/ https://flowx.io/) on Android which has had a similar graph/visualization with the addition of also having a radar view.
    • duanem 4y ago
      BTW, I'm in the process of porting Flowx to Apple. It's not as complete as the Android version but it's in beta testing if you'd like to join. Just message me and I can send an invite.
  • jp191919 4y ago
    This looks like a nice option, but no android app
  • dcre 4y ago
    Thank you, I love it. Weather Underground has something similar, but this has the potential to get a lot better.
  • bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
    Hey, me too. Once I downloaded Weather Strip I had trouble understanding how its display methodology wasn't just the standard across weather apps -- I was hit with a serious “wait, why isn't everything like this?” moment. I'd never seen another app that makes the weather so quickly grokkable.
• yreg 4y ago
  The article makes it sound like Apple just used Dark Sky as a backend and threw everything else away. In fact it seems that they inspired heavily from Dark Sky's UI as well. In my opinion iOS now has a very clever and polished Weather app that contains many of the features mentioned in the article. Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/GYP3ym8 https://imgur.com/a/GYP3ym8
  • expensive_news 4y ago
    You’re correct. I used Dark Sky for years and switched to the default iOS app when Apple bought Dark Sky and added all of the functionality to Weather. I did prefer the design of Dark Sky, since the data was larger and more visually separate from the background, allowing it to be more readable at a glance. But I found that after the big update they had essentially the same functionality and the same UI.
    • pasc1878 4y ago
      It is not the same UI It might be functionally the same e.g. It only shows conditions for the next 5 hours - not all day - how can you tell if you need a raincopat if you go ot. I am on an iPhone in portrait mode. DarkSky showed this as a column of data Weather as a row. This is fundamental to the whole UI.
      • skadamat 4y ago
        Author here -- Apple was definitely inspired by Dark Sky but IMO it's hard to argue that it's a replacement. If you compare the # of clicks it takes and the amount of time it takes to interpret information for the same task for Dark Sky vs the Apple Weather app, it becomes clear that the Apple Weather app "isn't quite there yet". But I hope it will be soon! If your needs are straightforward, then the Weather app is a pretty good replacement.
• cryptoz 4y ago
  Another Dark Sky thread, another opportunity to ask the community if anyone knows about Apple doing research with the barometers in their phones. Dark Sky claimed they 'did' but they never expanded on what that meant for them. Did they actually use the barometer data collected from the app? Or did it just get sent to /dev/null as I suspect? And if Apple bought that code, did they use it themselves? Is Apple doing anything to improve weather forecast accuracy in the main weather models by running data assimilation on cleaned barometer data? If not it is such a wasted opportunity that I just get so angry about. If so....please tell us more.
  • withinboredom 4y ago
    I suspect barometer data from phones would be junk unless you can correlate it with other data. The phone’s barometer is sensitive enough to detect the pressure difference (altitude change) of a few cm. That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather.
    • cryptoz 4y ago
      Yes, but, significant work was done at an academic level between 2011 and 2017, researchers at universities, grad student projects, etc, that resulted in usable data being extracted. I worked on this problem for ~10 years off and on. It is absolutely doable. Especially since you don't actually _need_ raw pressure data to be useful. Pressure rate of change over time is still useful and produces improved accuracy in some local forecasts. But not only that, the researchers at UW under Cliff Mass found that you can do on-device ML to clean the quality of the data, remove errors, and live-adjust to MSLP on-device, without even needing the dense network of sensors nearby for error correction. It's 100% doable, but it just takes some hard science and effort. > That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather Yes, but, the noise problem was solved half a decade ago.
      • withinboredom 4y ago
        Huh. This is why I love HN. I didn’t know about that but looking up these papers to see if this approach would be useful to some other stuff I’m working on with similar-ish noise problems that conventional algorithms aren’t working for.
• BugsJustFindMe 4y ago
  Dark Sky was fine and all, but in my view it didn't even come close to the elegant perfection of their precusor forecast.io's secret-for-no-good-reason and then canceled-for-no-good-reason /lines interface.
• davweb 4y ago
  Carrot Weather added the "inline" view which replicates Dark Sky pretty well. [1] It's been an easy transition for me, although Carrot is more expensive. [1]: http://meetcarrot.com/weather/goodbyedarksky.html http://meetcarrot.com/weather/goodbyedarksky.html
  • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Well, I tried to install this on Android and was met with "unable to connect to server." I wonder if Carrot is using the Dark Sky API.
    • davweb 4y ago
      Carrot lets you pick your data source [1]. One of the options is the Dark Sky API which is still operating until March 31 [2]. [1]: https://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/ https://support.meetcarrot.com/weather/ [2]: https://darksky.net/dev https://darksky.net/dev
      • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        Maybe on Apple devices. There's no option on Android devices to choose the API. Just a button to refresh and another that gives witty replies if you press it.
      • pasc1878 4y ago
        Well perhaps March 21st. Carrot seems not to be working withe Dark Sky now but does with other sources. In the UK the DarkSky source data also appears better. Unfortunately the MetOffce app is not good.
      • Rebelgecko 4y ago
        I don't have an option to pick my data source. Theres just a "retry" button
  • leokennis 4y ago
    Same for https://weathergraph.app https://weathergraph.app
• boringg 4y ago
  Dark sky was well done, i don't understand why someone else doesn't replicate it. Apple weather isn't specific enough to be valuable. RIP
• dmje 4y ago
  My wife often asks me "but why would you care about the weather?" and I have to say that over the years I've either been ground down or simply come to understand her way of thinking. Yes it's sort of exciting to see graphs and charts and maps and stuff, but really - do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No. Do I need an alert to tell me it's going to rain soon? No. So, yeh, Dark Sky was beautiful but I'm not sure (for me anyway) a weather app is the necessity that many people claim it is.
  • uptown 4y ago
    Do you do anything outdoors? Sports? Hike? Drive? Own a home that is affected by storm systems? Commute on transit systems that are affected by the changing weather?
    • dmje 4y ago
      All of that, apart from the transit system thing - we don't have a lot of infrastructure where I live :-) But - am I affected by the weather? Nope.
  • burkaman 4y ago
    > do I make any decisions based on what my weather app is telling me? No. Do you not ever go outside? I can't imagine not caring about the forecast, I make decisions based on it every single day.
    • dmje 4y ago
      Sure. All the time - I'm a runner, a walker, I have teen kids who like walking, we have a dog. But is any of this really changed by knowing it's going to rain? Nope. I stick my nose out on a morning - if it's cold, I put on a warm coat. If it's going to rain, I put on something rainproof. No need for an app. Or, sadly, a chart or a graph...
      • burkaman 4y ago
        How do you know if it's going to rain? And how do you know what the temperature will be midday based on how it feels in the morning? I'm honestly just curious, these things are very variable in all the places I've lived. The presence or absence of clouds is not a great predictor of rain, and depending on the day it might be 20 degrees warmer in the afternoon or 0 degrees warmer. Obviously I can imagine living without a weather app, but I genuinely can't imagine having one but not finding it useful. One of the things people loved about Dark Sky was not just knowing whether it is or isn't going to rain, but that it's going to rain in precisely 35 minutes, I have time to bike to the store instead of driving. I used this a lot and it was very accurate.
• cmason 4y ago
  I’ve replaced Dark Sky with Windy but, although Windy is quite good, it doesn’t answer the same questions that Dark Sky answered quickly (and the article does a good job of pointing out these questions). https://www.windy.com/ https://www.windy.com/
• stronglikedan 4y ago
  I really miss Dark Sky, but MyRadar has been pretty good to me in its stead.
• Steltek 4y ago
  I'm a big fan of Weather Underground's 10 day forecast graph. Like Dark Sky, you can see the temperature ebb and flow, plus wind speeds, cloud cover, rain percentages (and amounts). One chart tells me every aspect of the weather that I need. Instead of an app, I just have a bookmark on my home screen.
  • switchbak 4y ago
    Weather underground's 10 day forecast, especially the expected precipitation graph is FANTASTIC! I've found it to be very reliable for predicting real rainfall amounts for planning outdoor activities. Too bad they don't show it on mobile though! Does anyone have a recommendation for something similar? The usability of the WU app is pretty awful.
• jameshart 4y ago
  Dark Sky was okay. As detailed here, it does a great job of centering on the actual user needs of weather app users. Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot. Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’ You know, northern Californians. It was a poor fit for people whose weather landscape includes frequent storms; snowfall; temperature ranges that go down below freezing (seriously - dark sky’s temperature graphs never marked freezing temperatures for some reason); multiple types of precipitation; etc.
  • apendleton 4y ago
    I dunno, I live in Washington, DC, which has many of those properties (snow, freezing temperatures, heavy thunderstorms in the summer), and knowing which ten-minute window in the next hour was the least likely to get me soaked if I wanted to pop out for coffee was still incredibly useful, and I have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. Certainly there were some days when the weather was shit regardless and there wasn't a good opening, but no app is going to remedy that.
  • mazork 4y ago
    I live in Montreal and I loved Dark Sky. So I'll disagree.
    • drcongo 4y ago
      UK here where we have all the weather all the time. I also disagree.
      • jameshart 4y ago
        I used to think the UK had all the weather too. Then I moved to New England, which still doesn’t get all the weather, but compared to the UK, feels like the weather is turned up to 11. What the UK has is changeable weather, which is, as I say, what dark sky excels at helping you with (‘will I need me brolly? Or will it blow away?’)
• causality0 4y ago
  I can't help but remember back when they got purchased and we Android users lamented that we were losing it and Apple was going to ruin it, and many of the responses were "Haha, you should've bought an iPhone, Dark Sky is going to be great with Apple's financial support!"
• cubefox 4y ago
  Related: Weather apps could in general be better, not just in terms of visualization. One thing which always annoys me is how they handle rain predictions. They give "probabilities" for rain. But what do those mean? The probability that it rains for at least one minute in the given time frame? And with at least x mm/inches of rain coming down? And isn't a low probability of short and weak rain totally different from a equally low probability of strong or long rain? But there is a perfectly elegant alternative: Just use the expected amount of rainfall. The epected value combines both amount and probability of rainfall in one single number, without being highly arbitrary like other approaches, such as the usual reporting of plain "probabilities" with unclear interpretation. (Of course one could add to the expected rainfall amount also the variance, to distinguish more certain predictions from more uncertain ones, though this information might often not even be that important.)
  • iudqnolq 4y ago
    Relatedly, I'm fasinated by how much human judgement goes into those numbers. A meteorologist with local expertise looks at a few different models, decides which are more likely to be accurate, and then fills out a grid.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • sweettea 4y ago
    Expected value is already what most forecasts show. Expected value conveys information poorly in some common cases, like thunderstorms in the summer. It is very different to hear there's a 20% chance of a thunderstorm, dropping an inch of rain, vs. a 100% chance of .2" rain - the former needs a backup plan to deal with rain, the latter needs to plan for rain. Hence I prefer the text forecasts from the NWS, which list an amount possible, plus more in thunderstorms, rather than a bare number. Meanwhile the 'probability' listed in forecasts is also well defined as an expected value - it's (probability of X% rain coverage) * (X %), over all X. (Rain is defined as > .01")
    • 4y ago
• mnutt 4y ago
  Related, the Dark Sky website and API began returning 503s earlier today, despite the Dark Sky Blog (the only thing still up) prominently displaying: > The Dark Sky API and website will continue to function until March 31st, 2023.
• drcongo 4y ago
  Brilliant article, but I'm surprised notifications don't get a mention, this was the killer feature of Dark Sky for me - notifications warning me of imminent rain / storm / snow and notifications telling me when it's going to stop and for how long. Made living with a dog that hates rain much easier. None of this has been brought over to the stock weather app properly, that notifies me of maybe one in every hundred rainfalls which is completely useless.
• alecfreudenberg 4y ago
  Shout out to FlowX on Android. ( https://flowx.io/ https://flowx.io/ ) The best weather app I've ever used. Much thanks to the founder Duane & his partner for the ongoing development
  • screamingninja 4y ago
    Not to be sceptical, but here's my initial impression. Try the "privacy" link at the bottom of their homepage. https://flowx.io/privacy/ https://flowx.io/privacy/ > Page not found (404) > Request Method: GET > Request URL: http://flowx.io/privacy/ http://flowx.io/privacy/ > Raised by: wagtail.core.views.serve > You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page. They tout excellent app UX but the website has a lot of rough edges visually. Again, not discounting their work. I'm still going to install and try out, but initial impressions matter.
    • alecfreudenberg 4y ago
      Good eye! I added this to their bugs forum. I believe they are still a team of one, and have focused on app progress and efficiency at the expense of bugs & loose ends that would typically be handled in a larger organization with dedicated teams for that sort of thing. I bet they would Personally I find it charming. That is until I run into a security issue. I can't speak for Flowx though.
      • duanem 4y ago
        I've actually already looked into the DEBUG=True issue just now. Setting it to false causes an "Internal Server Issue". So do I spend hours looking for a fix, look into replacing it with a static pages site (I'm thinking Hugo) or just go back to porting Flowx to Apple :-)
        • clawlor 4y ago
          > Never deploy a site into production with DEBUG turned on. - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/settings/#debug https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/settings/#debug Setting DEBUG = False doesn't cause in Internal Server Issue. The issue is caused by something else, having DEBUG = True just means Django will return a detailed error page, instead of a generic 500 error page. IIRC, DEBUG = True also used to leak memory, which doesn't matter so much for local development, where it's intended to be used.
• nixpulvis 4y ago
  I'm not sure I completely see the authors point about "Preserving temperature magnitudes in ranges", could someone help me understand? Specifically, I don't understand this: "all temperature ranges are rescaled to take up the same amount of space in the app.", since it seems like both the Dark Sky and Weather.app views use pills that don't cover the x axis, as expected.
  • skadamat 4y ago
    Author here! I think this image does the best job of showcasing the difference: https://i0.wp.com/nightingaledvs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/darksky9.png?w=1322&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/nightingaledvs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023... In Apple Watch, the min and max values (the numeric values left / right of the pills) are all aligned vertically on top of each other. In Dark Sky, they aren't aligned because the horizontal position is driven by the min and max values themselves. This is subtle but CRUCIAL for information graphics / software, where "glance-ability" is so so important.
    • nixpulvis 4y ago
      Wait, where is the Apple Watch in this? You mean iOS? In both screenshots of that image, the horizontal position of the pills are driven by the temperature. I don't see the difference other than where the min/max label is placed.
      • skadamat 4y ago
        Sorry I meant the Apple Weather app*
• IBCNU 4y ago
  Oh, great, yet another UI masterpiece swallowed by the insatiable maw of refinement culture at Apple. "Dark Sky" app was only a weather app, but it looked goth. It was our weather app, and it was beautiful in its simplicity. Now we're left with the soulless husk that is Apple Weather. But hey, why not? Let's strip away every last shred of uniqueness and character in the name of "refinement." Sigh. Guess I'll just go back to waiting for my bones to ache for my forecasts.
  • dang 4y ago
    Can you please not fulminate on HN? You may not owe big-corporate app-suppressers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it—we're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• volandovengo 4y ago
  Does anyone know why apple acquired them just to shut it down? It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design. To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened
  • drcongo 4y ago
    The weather data actually was pretty unique in that a lot of the rain / snow predictions were based on visually analysing the satellite imagery. I'd understand buying it just for that reason, but to then seemingly leave that out of the stock weather app seems bizarre. (I'm guessing they haven't ported that to the stock app as the stock app is dreadful at predicting imminent rain)
  • ianburrell 4y ago
    Did Apple include the local weather prediction in their app? That was the other impressive part of Dark Sky. The combination of prediction and design was why Dark Sky was so good. I use Android and never used the nice app, but used the predictions in other apps. Knowing when it was going to rain was really handy. Apps now their own predictions but not as good.
  • skadamat 4y ago
    The Dark Sky API was very popular, and at the time many weather apps on iOS did sketchy things with people's data. I sensed that Apple maybe wanted to provide a free weather API for weather apps to make it easier for anyone to make a weather app.
• jnsaff2 4y ago
  I always found it confusing, even after years of using it. I guess I was doing it wrong.
• NegativeLatency 4y ago
  I find it quite frustrating that I can't look at what the temp was a few hours ago in apple weather, really liked dark sky
• jliptzin 4y ago
  When I used to use dark sky the radar map was awful. Most frames seemed to be empty data and the animations were very jerky. At first I thought it was a temporary issue but it never got fixed even after many years of use. Did anyone else notice that?
  • yborg 4y ago
    Yes, and I've noticed that Apple's Weather app is *even worse* on that front. The regional radar views rarely load for me.
• realkiddredd 4y ago
  I went so far as to buy the Carrot premium version which allows you to get pretty close to the DS app with some settings. I don't mind paying for good design. The Apple weather app is laughingly antithetical to usual Apple design standards. Somewhere, Steve is not amused.
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I'm not a phone user, so the presentation of weather for me always tends to look fairly different than anything you'd "typically" see on a phone. That said, I have a hard time imagining how I could improve on the data density, clarity and depth of this 10 day forecast, customized by me, from wunderground.com https://imgur.com/5PIiB1h.png https://imgur.com/5PIiB1h.png You can see clearly: * 24hr temperature cycles * cloud cover vs. sun * wind speeds (with direction) * precipitation likelihood and amounts * barometric pressure * overall conditions Note only that, but I can mouseover the display and get per-hour specific details for every parameter. During storm season, with 1 click I can get to the "wundermap" which gives me 45-60 mins of storm tracking display, allowing me to make my own guess on whether or not a given storm complex is going to hit us head on or not, using "local knowledge" to shape my conclusion.
  • jnmandal 4y ago
    Do you mind sharing how you set that forecast UI up?
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      It's 95% them, 5% my choices of what to show. There's a customize button just above the right corner of the actual display. Click on that, and select what parameters you want to see from the 10 options. I chose to show: Cloud, Humidity, Chance of Precipitation, Pressure, Temperature, Wind Speed. Hope that helps. Oh, this is also the "10 day forecast". I never use the daily or hourly views.
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    wunderground 10 day is about as good as it gets
  • eitally 4y ago
    This looks similar to what I designed for myself using Meteogram[1]. [1] https://meteograms.com/ https://meteograms.com/ (I use the Android app)
  • dendrite9 4y ago
• p1mrx 4y ago
  What are the best Dark Sky clones out there? Ideally open source.
• whalesalad 4y ago
  The UI always kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Elements of it were neat, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. The real reason it succeeded was a lack of advertisements tbh.
• SystemOut 4y ago
  I would just like an app that has a functional precipitation map view. Both Dark Sky and the iOS Weather app have been horribly unreliable. Sometimes I can zoom in/out and it will/would work but it's amazing how often it doesn't. The Apple app has been even worse than Dark Sky was at this.
• chrisweekly 4y ago
  Dark Sky was great, and I agree w other commenters about the shortcomings of the default iOS Weather app. That said, if you're interested in terrific weather info and dataviz, I heartily recommend Windy.app.
• dang 4y ago
  Related - all the way back to a Show HN in 2011 (and see also https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=thegrossman https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=thegrossman): Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972839 - Feb 2023 (71 comments) Apple blundered when it killed off Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34663534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34663534 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Apple finally killed off the beloved Dark Sky weather app today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34207668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34207668 - Jan 2023 (7 comments) Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198207 - Dec 2022 (62 comments) DarkSky: The World’s Best Terrible Weather App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34178827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34178827 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191 - Dec 2022 (15 comments) Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142868 - Dec 2022 (24 comments) Dark Sky Removed from iOS App Store Ahead of Upcoming Shutdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893850 - Dec 2022 (3 comments) Ask HN: Dark Sky EOL, Which weather app do you like? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33153663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33153663 - Oct 2022 (5 comments) Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32817555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32817555 - Sept 2022 (301 comments) Dark Sky EOL: 1/1/2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32816725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32816725 - Sept 2022 (2 comments) In wake of Apple acquisition, Dark Sky ends Android support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049906 - Aug 2020 (21 comments) Ask HN: Best Dark Sky Replacement for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24030412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24030412 - Aug 2020 (5 comments) Ask HN: Dark Sky is gone. How can it be rebuild sustainably? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24023151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24023151 - Aug 2020 (5 comments) Dark Sky Joins Apple - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753192 - April 2020 (2 comments) Apple acquires Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739839 - March 2020 (576 comments) Dark Sky App is finally available on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684938 - May 2016 (1 comment) Dark Sky has a new owner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875478 - Jan 2015 (55 comments) Forecast – Worldwide Weather Forecasts From the Makers of Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446134 - March 2013 (45 comments) Dark Sky Version 2.0 (with sales figures) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382638 - Aug 2012 (1 comment) We just launched an API for down-to-the-minute rain predictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009349 - May 2012 (1 comment) Dark Sky - Weather Prediction, Reinvented - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186978 - Nov 2011 (79 comments) Show HN: Dark Sky, reinvented Weather Prediction and Radar Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3163426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3163426 - Oct 2011 (2 comments)
• random314 4y ago
  Probably internal political maneuvering by the iOS weather app team
• BenFranklin100 4y ago
  Meh. Dark sky visualization design was nothing special. The pinnacle of beautiful, compact, data rich weather apps remains Weather Underground back in its day before it got bought up and shredded. Now there was an weather app that could show you a week’s worth of weather at a glance.
• genericacct 4y ago
  Luckily It was surpassed by merrysky. The integration with rainviewer does It for me.
• jibbit 4y ago
  I would love to see screenshots of the first iteration of dark sky- for old times sake. Apple has well & truly forsaken us.
• vl 4y ago
  Dark Sky was good, but had it's strange quirks too. On top of that some features were undiscoverable - for example it was possible to click bubbles on the right side of the graph to get detailed view of the hour. Very useful, I stumbled on it randomly after years of use. Weather has same information, presented a bit in a different way. Sure, I think they could have done better job. Most important component, however, are the models they use. Weather/Dark Sky models are good, but at some moment they diverge from Wundeground - another app I use. So I started paying for Windy, which allows you to see a view with 6 (!) different models. I'm not sure why I need that, but I love having this feature.
• rz2k 4y ago
  Similarly, IBM bought Weather Underground, deprecated both Storm and Wunderstation apps with excellent visualizations, and then never bothered to release anything that was worth using. I keep Storm on an iPhone and look at it every so often, even though it no longer retrieves weather data.
• moneytoo 4y ago
  I ended up combining multiple forecast providers in a single chart and can't use (and don't need to) anything else. There were some good apps but most don't really help orientation within the chart or maintaining the chart scale. https://weatherian.com/ https://weatherian.com/
• zer0x4d 4y ago
  Anyone else notice how inaccurate the iOS weather app has gotten in iOS 16? It used to be very accurate in terms of rain/snow in California, but recently it's just completely wrong. I end up going to weather.com to get an accurate report.
  • ojkelly 4y ago
    Down in Melbourne, Australia it’s regularly 5-10 degrees wrong. It’s like they got a 7 day forecast, and never updated it. Something must have happened this year, because it used to be very accurate. Now, if if you want accurate weather (down under) you need to use the pretty good BOM app. But, it doesn’t have a Home Screen widget, or watch complications.
• outworlder 4y ago
  Dark Sky was eerily accurate, sometimes to the minute. That was great because my dog hates rain. I've often dropped what I was doing immediately and get out earlier because of a Dark Sky notification. If it told me I had 25 minutes before rain started, I really had 25 minutes. I've noticed that it got progressively less accurate the closer it got of the shutdown by Apple. The iOS weather app is pretty inaccurate and borderline useless in comparison. It will tell me it's raining when it's not and vice/versa. Time predictions are so out of whack that they might as well not be there; they also get revised all the time. I understand that weather can be finnicky and predictions are just that. But Dark Sky did it correctly and Apple does not. I wonder what was the point of acquiring them, if their UI is inferior (although pretty!) and so are the predictions.
  • sjs382 4y ago
    Totally. Using Dark Sky felt a little bit like a superpower.
  • ryanstorm 4y ago
    My outdoor hobby is limited by rain (rock climbing), so I've gone through most of the weather apps. Dark Sky was by far the best, both for accuracy and visualization. I'm in this thread to hopefully find an alternative, and wunderground.com looks like it might be the ticket.
• polyterative 4y ago
  Forecaster for Android shares some good ideas with this
• iguana_lawyer 4y ago
  The closing of Dark Sky was a tremendous loss. We went from having minute-accurate weather forecasts to having daily forecasts like the ones from a century ago. It was devastating.
• chrisbrandow 4y ago
  I have not found a replacement for the 1 week precipitation map on any of the usually suggested apps. Has anyone else found this feature elsewhere?
• Mizoguchi 4y ago
  By far the best weather app.
• wrs 4y ago
  The explanation of the flaw (if there is one) in the temperature display doesn’t make sense. Both apps are scaling the temperature bars in the same way. The Weather app is just putting a dark background behind the “pills” and left/right aligning the numbers. The pills/bars themselves are the same on both.
• djsavvy 4y ago
  The very first thing I noticed in the screenshots was the presence of arrows in the cloud cover/radar image. This immediately conveys where the storm is headed. In contrast, one of my least favorite parts of the Apple weather app is the radar view --- in order to see where a storm is headed I need to open the map, select the 24 hour forecast, wait for all the data to load (often several seconds, if not more!), and then let the whole animation play out. What would take me less than half a second on Dark Sky ends up taking me 10-30+ seconds on Apple Weather.
• WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  The main thing that I miss about Dark Sky is that it realized where I live. Not the larger city next door. I live in a tiny alcove surrounded by hills and our weather can be up to 5 degrees cooler than the valley south of me. Apple Weather just doesn't offer that precision. The disappearance of Dark Sky is literally what Apple has been doing to the whole computer world. Enforcing their direction, because it's better, while taking away your choice. There are certain things that shouldn't be summarized. Weather is one of them. The Weather UI is a (failed) exercise of trying to reduce a days worth of weather in a single icon. I currently use https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=34.1823&lon=-114.7859&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=34.1823&lon=-1...
• LeoPanthera 4y ago
  I have switched to "windy.com" (not the confusingly similarly-named windy.app), not because it has an amazing UI, but because it's one of the few weather apps that lets me see the output of the forecasting models directly. Emphasis on the "s", it supports multiple models and you can switch between them. In the USA, the "HRRR" model is freakishly accurate over the next 72 hours. Everyone talks about UI, but you can have the most amazing UI in the world and it would be useless if it was presenting you with bad data.
• Timmi2000 4y ago
  My go to weather site is: https://kachelmannwetter.com/ https://kachelmannwetter.com/ Run by a former weatherman it uses a number of forecast models and even lets you see whether a gust of air from a specific region is going to reach you (interesting if you live in Europe and a Ukranian NPP blows up)
• yencabulator 4y ago
  > It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands. While this is true on the multi-day range for sure, what really made Dark Sky magical was its to-the-minute prediction of rain. If Dark Sky said "rain in 22 minutes", you had 18-26 minutes to walk a dog before getting wet. No other weather app has ever come close to that.