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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

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.
nonethewiser 4y ago
I’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 ago
  Say it says “32F low for saturday”. Is it going to freeze friday night at 1am (aka sat morning) or sat at 11pm?
- prophesi 4y ago
  Yep, 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 ago
  It's very rare that I need to know about what the weather was like a few hours in the past.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Then 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
      absolutely the radio and local news television forecasts have always had daily high and low boundaries, not sure what is up with these people’s atypical mental models? They must not have listened to the news on the radio or on television growing up? Why should an app create a UI design pattern that goes against the majority of people’s mental models.
roberttod 4y ago
Piggybacking 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 ago
Here'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 ago
Companies 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 ago
  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. 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 ago
    So true…
  - daniel_reetz 4y ago
    Another 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 ago
    They get brittle in colder weather? Never heard of this, can you explain a bit more?
tshaddox 4y ago
It'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 ago
  Google's weather feature on Android does this :) They don't call it "high" and "low", instead calling it "day" and "night".
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    What if the low temperature is forecast to be at noon?
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Then you live in Antarctica, it's winter, and you're out of scope.
      - tshaddox 4y ago
        Definitely 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 ago
Worth noting the facet you're criticizing is how Dark Sky did it.
calsy 4y ago
Daily 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.

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.

nonethewiser 4y ago

I’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 ago
Say it says “32F low for saturday”. Is it going to freeze friday night at 1am (aka sat morning) or sat at 11pm?
prophesi 4y ago
Yep, 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 ago
It's very rare that I need to know about what the weather was like a few hours in the past.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Then 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
    absolutely the radio and local news television forecasts have always had daily high and low boundaries, not sure what is up with these people’s atypical mental models? They must not have listened to the news on the radio or on television growing up? Why should an app create a UI design pattern that goes against the majority of people’s mental models.

roberttod 4y ago

Piggybacking 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 ago

Here'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 ago

Companies 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 ago
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. 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 ago
  So true…
- daniel_reetz 4y ago
  Another 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 ago
  They get brittle in colder weather? Never heard of this, can you explain a bit more?

tshaddox 4y ago

It'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 ago
Google's weather feature on Android does this :) They don't call it "high" and "low", instead calling it "day" and "night".
- tshaddox 4y ago
  What if the low temperature is forecast to be at noon?
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Then you live in Antarctica, it's winter, and you're out of scope.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      Definitely 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 ago

Worth noting the facet you're criticizing is how Dark Sky did it.

calsy 4y ago

Daily 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.