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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 els
by 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 agoCan 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 agoOh, that drives me insane. It makes it absolutely useless for figuring out how to dress for outdoor activities.
- athenot 4y agoThey 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.
- nonethewiser 4y agoI’m confused why the daily minimum would include times outside the day. That doesn’t seem like a daily minimum by definition. The way Apple does it is exactly how I assumed it would work. Is the alternative you described standard?
- TheJoeMan 4y agoSay it says “32F low for saturday”. Is it going to freeze friday night at 1am (aka sat morning) or sat at 11pm?
- prophesi 4y agoYep, Dark Sky's way is standard. Weather.com and the like show the next low. Today in my area is actually the perfect example, currently ~40f. It shows a high of ~55f and a low of ~53f. Apple's weather app shows a low of ~40f.
- eli 4y agoIt's very rare that I need to know about what the weather was like a few hours in the past.
- nonethewiser 4y agoThen don’t look at past temps. The daily low is the lowest temp of the day. It could very well be in the future. But it’s certainly not in the next day, and it’s not from a specific hour. If you want to see tomorrow mornings temps look at tomorrow’s hourly temps. Do you expect the daily high to work the same? So maybe at 4pm it’s down from the daily high and now it shows today’s high is actually some temp around 3pm tomorrow? I get what you’re saying but in no way is that a daily high. More like a next 24 hour high but even then, do you want that? That means if it’s 80F at 3pm today and 90F at 3pm tomorrow and it’s 3pm, then the high will be 90. It’s much easier to just accurately categorize these by day/hour and let the user find what they care about instead of warping definitions to anticipate certain use cases.
- sizzle 4y ago
- roberttod 4y agoPiggybacking your piggyback, that graph for the temperature throughout the day looks pretty but damn terrible UX in comparison to dark sky. Hourly temperatures/rain/etc gives me everything I need at a glance without having to drag my finger to the time I am interested in.
- Camillo 4y agoHere's an egregious UX error in the Apple Weather app: when you look at the precipitation map, it animates the situation throughout the day, but the current time it's showing is only indicated by the cursor in a timeline at the bottom. Your location in the center in the map, where you want to look, only shows the current temperature and weather: it does not animate with the timeline and the rest of the map, and does not show the time the map is currently reflecting. So if you look at the center of the screen you have no idea what time's situation the map is showing, and if you look at the bottom you can see the time, but not the situation. You have to stop the animation, manually drag the cursor to "now", look at the storm pattern, then manually drag it an hour forward, look at the map again, etc.
- Spooky23 4y agoCompanies solve their own problems. Outlook is one of the classic examples of that - it was an app that was a cultural snapshot of Microsoft. In the case of Apple, Cupertino is a pretty boring weather locale. Sometimes you need to zipper your coat and once in awhile it rains.
- reaperducer 4y agoIn the case of Apple, Cupertino is a pretty boring weather locale. Sometimes you need to zipper your coat and once in awhile it rains. Which also explains why iPhone headphone wires get brittle in moderately cold weather, and iPhones go into thermal shutdown mode at temperatures that are common in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the non-Bay Area parts of California.
- MetaMalone 4y agoSo true…
- daniel_reetz 4y agoAnother example: Corporate HQs have world class internet access. No latency high bandwidth connections. If folks building lazy loading web interfaces had to use their stuff in rural North Dakota, much less outside the US, they'd be shocked at how terribly it performs and user-hostile it feels.
- sizzle 4y agoThey get brittle in colder weather? Never heard of this, can you explain a bit more?
- tshaddox 4y agoIt's interesting you say that, because I have been under the impression that weather apps always show daily low temperatures based on the calendar day (midnight-to-midnight). I've always thought they could be improved by showing the overnight low, which you're saying is the case for some weather apps. Which ones are those? It's also worth noting that the midnight-to-midnight scheme is a lot more well-defined than the alternative we're both advocating. What do you show as the low temperature for today if it's currently 3am and the temperature isn't going to drop until 3am tomorrow? If that temperature drop is displayed as today's low temperature, then I won't be able to discern whether it will get cold during this night (i.e. today between 1am and 7am) or the following night (i.e. between 7pm today and 7am tomorrow). Not to mention that cold systems can move in at any time, and it may be much colder at noon tomorrow than 3am tomorrow, so in many case "overnight low" isn't even what you care about.
- cglong 4y agoGoogle's weather feature on Android does this :) They don't call it "high" and "low", instead calling it "day" and "night".
- tshaddox 4y agoWhat if the low temperature is forecast to be at noon?
- ethbr0 4y agoThen you live in Antarctica, it's winter, and you're out of scope.
- tshaddox 4y agoDefinitely not. It’s common in places where the weather actually changes due to things other than the time of day, i.e. where cold systems move in. For example, look at the forecasts in the Chicago area where tomorrow (March 23) it’s going to be a fair bit colder at noon than at 1am. This is not at all uncommon, and is in fact precisely why it’s important to check the weather forecast in the morning on normal days when you’re deciding what to wear.
- syntheticnature 4y agoWorth noting the facet you're criticizing is how Dark Sky did it.
- calsy 4y agoDaily min/max by calendar day has never been a standard. Weather is not divided by some arbitrary time humans created. Max and min temperatures occur overwhelmingly in their respective day and night cycle. Adding some arbitrary cut off point in the middle of those cycles just makes comprehending max/min temps unnecessarily more difficult then it needs to be. What if we set the calendar day to change at midday, would we start reporting max temps up to 12pm, past 12pm? How useful do you think that info would be? People are interested in the overnight minimum, not a confusing minimum that could be either early morning or just before midnight depending on the weather at the time.
- bmitc 4y agoAnd it wasn't just how it looked either. Dark Sky was a weather app that was actually accurate for what you wanted it for. It really frustrates me that Apple completely killed off the product. I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.
- bradleyankrom 4y agoWhatever model the Weather app uses has been hopelessly unreliable and at times downright incorrect. Dark Sky wasn’t always accurate (no model is), but it seemed to match reality more often than not.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jjulius 4y ago>I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is. Shot in the dark - Apple wants you to live and die within Apple's ecosystem, using only Apple products. Doesn't matter if they own Dark Sky, it's not "Apple Weather", and that's what they want - iThis, iThat, Apple Something, Mac Whatever. Dark Sky also didn't look or feel like the rest of Apple's products, and they want consistency and are not about to redesign the rest of their software line to fit with Dark Sky's much-loved UI/UX. Why redo everything you've done when you can just kill off this one little thing and force everyone back over to you?
- scarface74 4y agoApple also made the underlying API available for both iOS and Android. Someone is free to create a similar app.
- screamingninja 4y ago> free to create a similar app Only if you sign up for the Apple Developer Program, comply with all their rules and expectations, and not be surprised if they ban you from using it with no explanation whatsoever.
- scarface74 4y agoYes because out of the millions of app submissions that happen every year, you are likely to “be banned” for some arbitrary reason that is not spelled out. That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago> That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers… Apple products are popular among consumers and developers in spite of their many user-hostile decisions precisely because there are few alternatives, all of which have substantial disadvantages as well.
- scarface74 4y agoSo if Apple products are “user hostile” then why are enough users happily spending twice as much on iPhones and more on Macs to make Apple the most valuable company in the world? Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago> So if Apple products are “user hostile” then why are enough users happily spending twice as much on iPhones and more on Macs They aren't all "happy" about it, but as I mentioned in the post you replied to, there is not a decent alternative. > Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil. Certainly not but one would have to be interested in the fact of the matter to realize it.
- moneywoes 4y agoAny good alternatives since?
- screamingninja 4y agohttps://www.windy.com/ https://www.windy.com/ Probably some of the best visualization techniques I have seen. Free features cover most use cases; premium gives you better resolution.
- dguest 4y agoWindy is awesome, although a bit overkill if you just want to know if it's going to rain in your town later today.
- dguest 4y agoI'm a huge fan of a few government sponsored ones: - A great simple one is YR: https://www.yr.no/en https://www.yr.no/en - if you happen to be in Switzerland: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.admin.meteoswiss https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.admin.meteo..., https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meteoswiss/id589772015 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meteoswiss/id589772015 Government sponsored apps are great because there's no advertising, they aren't selling your data, and they are free. They usually pay to collect the data, run the models, and provide the API anyway. Providing the app is the cheap part.
- s0rce 4y agoIf you are in the USA the national weather service is great, its not flashy but good and you can read the text forecast discussion. Otherwise Windy.com and Meteoblue are good.
- nofinator 4y agoI've been using Today Weather on Android ever since Dark Sky was killed off there. It looks nice, lots of different data sources, and the $7 lifetime Premium Version is a good price.
- 4y ago
- adql 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. "I hate them so I will only give them a tiny bit less money" is why it will never change
- ajmurmann 4y agoI think a big problem is that there are few choices because of constant consolidation. This is reflected in two ways: a) every big tech company tries to do a ton of stuff. I'm not happy with this weather app. Usually the market would reflect this by me buying a different weather app. However, Apple isn't in the weather app market, they are in the phone and computer market. If I buy a different weather app, Apple actually gets more money! Buying a different phone because Apple made the decision to kill my favorite weather app is now muddled in with so many other factors and Apple and their shareholders are unlikely to link a drop in phone sales to killing the weather app. Now I also need to look at the very few real competitors and probably have issues with them as well. It's a mess because they all do too much. Maybe I don't want Android devices because Google built Bart without disclosing training sources. What a mess! b) someone builds something nice and it just gets killed by an incumbant. No real competition between most startups and incumbants. It's more like a buyer/seller relation I'd love to see this all fixed in my utopia by prohibiting acquisitions and instead force companies to fight for customers. But I'm sure that would need to happen globally to avoid putting our own companies at a disadvantage where they'll just get their lunch stolen by companies that aren't limited like that. I'm also sure this solution has other side effects I cannot think of.
- whyenot 4y agoOk, let's play this game. I don't like what Apple did to Darksky, so I'll switch to Android. What do I do when Google inevitably does something similar, who do I switch to then?
- cheq 4y agoI will never get the fixation of US people to iPhones. Most android devices do the same, are cheaper, open, flexible and does about the same things.
- camel_gopher 4y agoIt was good enough that I moved from android to iPhone when they killed the android version
- jwcooper 4y agoTo make matters worse, Apple killed off the web version too, and didn't replace it with anything. The Dark Sky website was brilliant as well. It loaded quickly, wasn't covered in ads, and the UX was comparable to their app. I haven't really found anything to replace it with yet. I've defaulted to weather.gov, but the UX isn't really there yet (it's great for storms, or when you need to drill down into good data though).
- gpm 4y agoI've gone to windy.com for weather, which really isn't what is was meant for, but on a large screen it works fine.
- meandthebean 4y agoI've switched to Weather Underground 10-day view: https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/md/baltimore https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/md/baltimore I used the customize button to remove everything but temp, chance of rain and wind. It's no Dark Sky, but it's something.
- creeble 4y agoPretty happy with merrysky.net.
- p_j_w 4y ago>Apple killed off the web version too It boggles the mind, doesn't it? The equivalent of a bunch of food and housing was spent just so something useful could be taken out of half of the population's hands. Just think about that, overall social utility decreased and someone spent money to make it happen. Absolutely parasitic behavior.
- insane_dreamer 4y agoAgreed. Very poor decision on Apple's part. They should have just rebranded it and kept as is.
- leokennis 4y agoGive https://weathergraph.app https://weathergraph.app a try - it ticks more or less all of the boxes in this article. Only thing missing is the radar.
- highwaylights 4y agoEven that notification sound when it’s going to rain. Dark Sky was magical. It was the kind of experience Steve Jobs used to get giddy about on stage for 20 minutes at a time. Man I wish they could just hit the undo button on axing it.
- pmarreck 4y agoI can't delete the icon just yet. CARROT is OK for "a different kind of weather app", but nothing really is the same. Dark Sky's UI was just... Nice.
- Stubb 4y agoI still haven't forgiven Apple for killing off Aperture. To date nothing has come close to Aperture's seamless blending of image organizing, editing, and metadata enrichment. I'm not holding my breath that an app that feels like DarkSky will ever come along.