8 ms·
Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)
- mocmoc 9mo agoMeteoswiss app is the best weather app ever created
- FredFS456 9mo agoI haven't used Dark Sky but on my Android phone, Meteoswiss is definitely very very good
- Hnrobert42 9mo agoHow does it compare to Dark Sky?
- hdx19 9mo agoTry meteogram
- Hnrobert42 9mo agoBummer. It looks cool but no updates in five years. That doesn't bother me, except I wonder when Apple will kick it off the store. It also doesn't say anything about the privacy and data collected.
- fsh 9mo agoThe app is great, but unfortunately it only works in Switzerland. The same company also developed a german version (DWD WarnWetter, works for all of Europe), and recently a worldwide one (Fluid Meteo).
- DiabloD3 9mo agoDark Sky, my love <3
- pasc1878 9mo agoYes Dark Sky had the best UI of any weather app I have used. I now use Weathergraph which does it differently but I would go back to Dark Sky (and pay for it) in a flash. It shows the correct things and on a phone understands that showing the temperatures across the screen is useless as if I go out I want to know what the weather is like when I might make the journey back in 8+ hours time. I might not care what the weather is in 4 hours time as I will be inside.
- gcanyon 9mo agoDark Sky was a marvel, and when it first came out, its ability to say rain will start where you are in 2-3 minutes was a marvel. The information design argument is 100% valid, but I also marvel that, having bought the company, Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate. I don't know whether Apple's privacy focus prevents them making the same precise predictions, or if there is some other reason they don't, but it's sad that in 2025 we don't have the same level of performance as we did twelve years ago.
- staindk 9mo agoKind of feel like watching Spiderman tonight and I don't know why hehe. In all seriousness I heard some good things of dark sky. My current weather app is windy.com and I believe it's more built for surfers and such (??) - not sure what the best android weather app is.
- jasonmccay 9mo agoYes! The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical, right out of Back to the Future 2. I used this countless times. So much of weather forecasting, at that time, was about trends and probabilities. DarkSky was about events, certainty, and action. It was truly ahead of anything else and forced a new standard.
- crazygringo 9mo ago> The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical But iOS has this now. It's the same thing. They integrated it from Dark Sky.
- 3333333331 9mo agoit doesn't work nearly as well. i'm not sure why, but the predictions are significantly worse than dark sky's were
- Handy-Man 9mo agoApple should have just used that app itself, rather than trying to build whatever that they have right now.
- treesknees 9mo agoThe Apple Weather app has gotten better over time, though it’s still not a perfect replacement. Scrolling through the Dark Sky screenshots, I can recognize many of the same things now incorporated with Apple’s. And Apple does offer location specific notifications of rain which I find to be pretty accurate, about as accurate as Dark Sky. There’s largely a perception problem with Apple. People loved Dark Sky as an independent small app that worked well, before Apple took it and destroyed it. Now, even if Apple incorporated all of the same data and features, it still wouldn’t give that same spark of joy people had.
- al_borland 9mo agoI still think DarkSky made it easier to visualize the day. With Apple, when I tap on a day to see the details, the temperature and rain forecasts are in two separate graphs, instead of being unified into one easily glanceable view. This is what I really liked about DarkSky. I didn’t have to read and understand the forecast, I could simply glance at it and intuitively have an understanding of the day’s weather. Apple lost this, and I think it is what gave DarkSky so much value.
- Leftium 9mo agoI designed https://weather-sense.leftium.com https://weather-sense.leftium.com to make it easier to visualize both the day and week. Even without any text labels, you should be able to get a feel for what the weather is and how it will change: - Hourly plots like Dark Sky, with everything (temperature, rain, AQI, weather conditions) in a single plot. - The change in temperature visualized with both color and space. Space is obvious (higher -> hotter); color ranges from red for hottest to blue for coldest. All the visible plots share the same color-temperature mapping. So the gradient block to the left shows both the temperature range for that day as well as how it compares to other days. - Finally, there is a weekly overview at the top.
- myko 9mo ago> still not a perfect replacement Not a replacement at all for Android subscribers!
- 9mo ago
- kdheepak 9mo agofwiw, on iOS, I like using WeatherGraph: https://weathergraph.app/ https://weathergraph.app/ The developer is very responsive, lots of UI customization (both app and widgets) is possible, and pricing is reasonable.
- dmd 9mo agoThey used to be very responsive. “Multiple locations are on the way” (bottom left corner) has been like that for years now. Still the best of all the weather apps though.
- tomaskafka 9mo agoHi, I know it took much longer than it should have, but I have multiple locations implemented now and am adding the final polish before release - here are few screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/2vMAJHB https://imgur.com/a/2vMAJHB I should be able to release it before the end of January. Best, Tomas
- dmd 9mo ago<3 <3 <3
- al_borland 9mo agoI just downloaded it to try it out after seeing it in a few comments. While some of the visualizations seem like ones I could get used to and like, the radar is severely lacking. I use radar a lot and DarkSky’s view was amazing and just fun to play with. Weather Graph has it buried at the bottom and just loads up weather.gov. It’s hard to justify paying a premium with radar feeling pretty ignored. His website mentions radar won’t be coming in the near term. I think that’s a deal breaker for me.
- PhotonHunter 9mo agoIf you use radar a lot, have you tried RadarScope? Nothing else even comes close to comparing.
- shaky-carrousel 9mo agoA really good Android open source alternative is Breezy Weather: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather
- XzetaU8 9mo agoBreezy Weather and Weather Master right now are IMO the two best open source weather apps on Android https://github.com/PranshulGG/WeatherMaster https://github.com/PranshulGG/WeatherMaster
- starkparker 9mo agoI prefer Bura[1] over it, Breezy doesn't communicate the daily things I need (and that the link talks about) as well for me 1: https://github.com/davidtakac/bura/ https://github.com/davidtakac/bura/
- pinusc 9mo agoI have been using breezy weather and I like it overall. But after reading this article I can't help but be bugged off that the information density in the main page is significantly worse here than in Dark Sky. Dark Sky showed hourly forecast with a 2h resolution. This is a negligible difference in precision IMHO (weather predictions are inherently imprecise anyway - and a more precise graph could be - is - one tap away), but it allows to show a time range that is twice as wide! On my screen, breezy weather is able to show me the forecast for the next 5h until I scroll - this is OK, but it's annoying. The hours are very spaced apart, and there is a 1h resolution. With tighter spacing and 2h resolution, 12 or 16 hours could be displayed at once - which is far more likely to cover the time I am going to spend outside, which as the article states, is the main reason why I might want to check an hourly forecast anyway. All the other android apps mentioned here have the same issue. I might try to open an issue in their GH, or even a PR... A toggle for "denser graphs" and a setting for hourly resolution could do wonders.
- GabrielMMMM 9mo agoThere is a really good iOS app called Brzzy Weather! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brzzy-weather/id6670187343 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brzzy-weather/id6670187343
- ayaros 9mo agoWhat drives me crazy is Apple redesigned their weather app not so long after acquiring dark sky. I was anticipating a polished, updated version of Dark Sky's UI. Instead we have the current design, which is quite frankly terrible.
- gosub100 9mo agoSo what happened with previous customers who (I'm presuming) paid for the app? Did their app keep running or were they given a refund? I am guessing it used publicly available weather data, but even then, if the server names changed (and support was ended), wouldn't the app quit working?
- Amezarak 9mo agoI paid for it and got nothing at all. I don't remember if the app quit working or if Apple force removed it from my phone.I felt absolutely scammed - it's literally the only app I've ever paid for. It really sucks. Do they use the same data? I've noticed Apple Weather is substantially less accurate than Dark Sky. If Dark Sky told me it was going to rain in 10 minutes for 7 minutes, that's what was going to happen. If Apple Weather says it, well, maybe.
- al_borland 9mo agoDarkSky seemed to have their own weather service (not sure the source data), but they had their own API that other apps used. Apple shut the API down after a couple years. This meant the death of the DarkSky website and the old apps. Apple says they use data from the weather channel, but this varies based on country. It used to say right in the app, but it seems like they removed that in favor of this link: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105038 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105038
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoActually Apple says they use their own data (presumably Dark Sky) and used to use the Weather Channel in the US.
- chrneu 9mo agoI was an android user when it went offline. When Apple bought it they kind of mothballed it for a year or so, no updates but it still worked. Then they took the apps off the stores, but the API was still enabled for a lil while longer, so other services still functioned for the most part. Then one day it just stopped working and it all went away. But it took apple ~18 months or so to kill it off, if I remember right. But there was never any refund or whatnot.
- tunapizza 9mo agoFortunately someone recreated a clone at https://merrysky.net https://merrysky.net, which was featured [1] on HN some time ago. I've used it daily since. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191
- kotaKat 9mo agoAnd a toast to its source, the drop-in PirateWeather API: https://pirateweather.net/ https://pirateweather.net/
- chrisweekly 9mo agoGreat rec! Thanks! See also Windy.app (a paid app w/ great dataviz, dx, and robust set of data sources).
- CraigRood 9mo agoWindy.app looks good visually, but once you start using it, the UX is all over the place. Always find it frustrating.
- chrisweekly 9mo agoInteresting! I used it heavily for years as a sailor and found it intuitive. Clearly, YMMV. :)
- chrneu 9mo agofor what it's worth, most people i know prefer windy.com over windy.app Windy.app is for wind based water activities. Windy.com is a data-heavy weather information site.
- ako 9mo agoAs a windsurfer, wingfoiler, and kitesurfer i can only say that both Windy.app a nd Windy.com are awesome. Like the ability to compare different models easily.
- owenthejumper 9mo agoI still miss Dark Sky, and years later find myself instinctively typing "darksky" into my phone to check weather. Nothing is coming closer...
- metalliqaz 9mo agoOh the irony. A website dedicated to data visualization and it's totally broken on Desktop Firefox. If they had just created a straightforward article, it would be perfectly legible, but all the flashy-flash just makes it unintelligible.
- metalliqaz 9mo agoI just always use the excellent 10-day forecast tab on wunderground
- the__alchemist 9mo agoNote: Not related to the light-pollution organization https://darksky.org/ https://darksky.org/
- lynndotpy 9mo agoAmong all the destruction Apple has wrought when they killed DarkSky, they also failed to bring back the weather history feature. You could go back decades and see the weather anytime, anywhere. I miss it so.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoThe Apple Weather app absolutely sucks. I have learned to ignore its predictions. It will say that it's sunny outside, and I'll look out the window, and we're having a hailstorm.
- Mistletoe 9mo agoCan anyone recommend a good app to replace it? No ads, lightweight etc.
- macintux 9mo agoI’ve been happy with Carrot.
- Leftium 9mo agohttps://weather-sense.leftium.com https://weather-sense.leftium.com: just a web app, but you can add it to your home screen to access like an app[1] [1]: https://polarhabits.com/mobile https://polarhabits.com/mobile
- Mistletoe 9mo agoEdit: Google Gemini suggested Hello Weather and loving it so far.
- arendtio 9mo agoIf you are interested in German weather, I can recommend the DWD WarnWetter App. It is so good that the competitors sued when it was free. Now it costs a one-time fee of about 3€.
- SkyPuncher 9mo ago
- bookofjoe 9mo agoSee also: Polaroid Pebble Palm Oldsmobile Tower Records Borders Pan Am
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoPebble's back, I thought.
- al_borland 9mo agoCorrect https://repebble.com/ https://repebble.com/
- bookofjoe 9mo agosame same but different — and better
- chrisweekly 9mo agoI miss Dark Sky for its impressive "local weather at a glance" accuracy and UX -- but Windy.app is pretty great too, with more details than DS ever had. They're maybe slightly complementary, given Windy.app is more like "prosumer" weather forecasting for nautical purposes, but I highly recommend it.
- asymmetric 9mo agoFrom my quick research, it seems like people in the sailing community actually prefer Windy.com to Windy.app. (yes, there's a very confusing name clash)
- chrisweekly 9mo agoI'm the OP, a sailor, and I was referring to the native iOS app.
- chrneu 9mo agoVentusky and Windy.com are my go to nowadays. They give me a ton of information which enables me to make my own decisions about weather. The ability to change forecasting models really quickly is nice, too. The ventusky android app is pretty decent, too.
- Noaidi 9mo agoOh how I miss DarkSky, and accuracy in weather apps in general. I have no idea if it is AI or just enshitification, but wow, local temps are just always way off with Apple Weather and most other apps. This is important to me because I live in my van and I am talking about these apps being off 5 to 10 degrees. The only one that comes close is Accuweather but their interface is horrific. And forget about the widgets...just show me the highs and lows for the week and quit changing the layout like you think i know what I want, because you do not.
- chrneu 9mo agoCheckout forecast advisor. It ranks forecasting services for a location and gives you a summary forecast based on all the different services for that location. Whenever I travel I find it pretty helpful. Certain services are just garbage in some areas. For example, Foreca is like 84% accurate for my home location, but it's only 60% accurate for one of the cabins I frequent.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoUnfortunately doesn’t include Apple Weather or AccuWeather so not as useful to me, but top at my location is only 81%.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoIf you are on iPhone and can afford it, Carrot Weather can show you Accuweather with Dark Sky’s interface.
- webdoodle 9mo agoI knew so many people that used Dark Sky before Apple bought it...
- hmartin 9mo agoI miss it too, so I created a web based weather app directly inspired by Dark Sky: https://github.com/hbmartin/open-sun https://github.com/hbmartin/open-sun
- IgorPartola 9mo agoClicking History, Forecast, and Notifications at the bottom doesn’t seem to do anything.
- dangoodmanUT 9mo agoyeah, nothing hits like dark sky hit
- xtiansimon 9mo agoI enjoyed this write-up on UI design and Visualization topic. The table of user "context and situation" is a great document. You can easily envision authoring this table and scrolling to the right of your initial columns (A,B) to see further into the design process, A) "When I hear about a storm, I want to prepare my loved ones, my property, etc. B) Storm forecast ... : - Where is the storm right now and is it heading my direction? [...] N) _Show the storm front using _directional arrows_ ... (compact and replaces need for animation)_ The last section concludes in praise of the design and includes this: _"rigorously iterated on data visualization design". I wish we would have seen evidence of this, principally in the form of older screen shots of the design. I think design iteration is the difference between mere good design and good products, and legendary product design. Personally, I'd love to see a write up of my favorite whipping post, Transit App. Oh boy did that app go down hill, and with such great potential.
- quotemstr 9mo agoI thought we lived in the age of infinite AI software and you could just ask for a Dark Sky clone. Weather APIs are pretty open. What's stopping you?
- neuroelectron 9mo agoStop trying to hold VCs to account as they try to buy all the ram in the world with infinite pretend money and their infinite pretend profits to put in their infinite pretend GPUs and their infinite pretend capacity, supported by the infinite pretend infrastructure that will never exist that we will also be forced to pay for.
- add-sub-mul-div 9mo agoWhy did you think AI has the capability of creating an app with a ton of care and unique touch put into it as opposed to some hello world/proof of concept skeleton app?
- quotemstr 9mo agoBecause hundreds of big Twitter accounts tweet all day that I'm NGMI if I don't think AI is bigger for humanity than agriculture. Duh.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoCarrot does this, but Dark Sky was more than just a repeat of weather data from other sources. They built their own geographic models with feedback to create their hyperlocal forecasts. Apple has that technology but their implementation hasn’t seemed to be as good (possibly because their feedback loop is slow).
- rrosen326 9mo agoFor weather data and amazing visualizations see https://weatherspark.com/ https://weatherspark.com/ Check out their compare feature. Brilliant. Eg: Seattle vs London https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/913~45062/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-Seattle-and-London https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/913~45062/Comparison-of-t... (Not affiliated. Just an admirer.)
- loire280 9mo agoI still mourn the loss of Weatherspark's old Flash interface, which brilliantly displayed all of this data in a single pane to give context to the recent, current, and forecasted weather. I've never seen as concise a visualization of current and historical weather data.
- josters 9mo agoDo you maybe have sceeenshots of this? Would love to see some more ways of compacting and visualizing this data in a digestible way.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- djoldman 9mo agoCan someone explain why the main screen in iOS weather, below the current temperature, shows the high temperature to the left of the low temperature? In all other places in the app, the low is to the left of high.
- wpm 9mo agoBecause most of Apple's designers do not have the discipline or the blessedly smaller scope to consistently output well designed interfaces anymore, and are riding the momentum of those that came before and the current of hot air of their own supply these days. The idea that Apple is full of good designers should be forgotten. They're as mid and sloppy as any other large tech company.
- pasc1878 9mo agoAlthough having lost their cheif desihner recently there is a chnace thet they might improve and go back to the standards of 10 years ago.
- parpfish 9mo agoEven worse: why do they use high/low based on calendar date rather than daily high and overnight low. During a cold snap one cold night will show up as the low for two consecutive days instead of a single “overnight”
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoIn Carrot and Apple Weather, I think the daily temperature graphs should be chronological so for those days where the low is late at night (temperature drops all day) you know when the cold is happening at a glance.
- hopelite 9mo agoIt wasn’t as much focused on high level information visualization as Dark Sky, but I also still miss the original Wunderground and its precipitation prediction cones and radar features that were accurate down to the second back before it was acquired by the weather channel, where it went to die of neglect. This topic raises an issue I’ve had in mind for a while, companies are not realizing their true value when they sell out to some exit, as is evident by the fact that the companies Andy what they created end up being taken out behind the shed. If a competitor is willing to pay a certain amount without extreme pain to the point of convulsion or you don’t get air tight contract that prevents killing off the service/product without it remitting back to the founders or being made open source, you are being low-balled. Taking the Wunderground example, those folks would have ended up owning the weather channel and probably buying or merging with Dark Sky and being the data provider to Apple instead of the Weather Channel characters (in case you don’t know about that entity) owning and killing off their baby.
- ceroxylon 9mo agoI still use Wunderground since it utilizes base stations within my own neighborhood, so the data is accurate down to the street level. Its precipitation percentages have also been much more accurate than Apple weather over the last few years (for me).
- chrneu 9mo agothis is a lil off topic, but fuck the weather channel. they've been lobbying for like a decade to get NOAA defunded. They're basically the Intuit/turbotax of the meteorology world.
- hopelite 9mo agoLobbying is not going to have an effect on that unless you have magnitudes greater pain to dish up than the industry lobbyists have gifts to bear. It's a big circle of mutual gratification and you aren't in it. If you have been lobbying that long with no effect, it's because of that. If you have any information, you should think about taking it to the OMG to see if they are interested, able to do a candid hidden camera thing. That might make a difference if it is done right.
- sega_sai 9mo agoPeople are guaranteed to be opinionated about weather apps. I personally use Meteogram (on android). There you see graphs of every weather related quantity you want on a single widget. That in combination with ventusky gives me everything I need.
- neuroelectron 9mo agoApple has never been interested in his ability. It's all about having a certain aesthetic that is uniquely apple. That's about it.
- piersj225 9mo agoAfter darksky was shutdown I ended up using, https://www.yr.no/en https://www.yr.no/en . I've not seen it recommended here before and thought someone might enjoy it
- shagie 9mo agoThey've also got a developer interface - https://developer.yr.no https://developer.yr.no One of the things that I've seen with them that I haven't seen with others is the cloud cover by layer. https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-6301678/United%20States/New%20York/New%20York%20City,%20Central%20Park https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-6301678/United%20States... https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-6301678/United%20States/New%20York/New%20York%20City,%20Central%20Park https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-6301678/United%20States... For doing photography (sunsets) there's a significant difference between 50% high clouds and 50% low clouds.
- pontussw 9mo agoThat L/M/H cloud breakdown is always beneficial, "Clear Outside" also has a similar feature in the forecast https://clearoutside.com/forecast/50.7/-3.52 https://clearoutside.com/forecast/50.7/-3.52
- tcumulus 9mo agoI know that this is shameless self-promotion, but maybe this could interest you: https://sunsethue.com/ https://sunsethue.com/ :)
- pontussw 9mo agoNice to see how much you've developed Sunsethue over the last two years! I remember I built myself some custom alert logic back with your API even before the public launch :) A year and a half or something later.. I recently started a project of my own trying to bring all "weather dependent" photo opportunities together in one place, if you wouldn't mind I would be happy to experiment with bringing Sunsethue data to https://photoweather.app https://photoweather.app - your prediction model is certainly a lot more sophisticated than mine and it would be very cool to offer that
- bobbylarrybobby 9mo agoTo those who are interested in viewing the “shape” of weather data (and who are using an apple device), I cannot recommend https://www.weatherstrip.app https://www.weatherstrip.app enough. I think its visualization is even superior to Dark Sky’s, mostly by virtue of being more compact without losing anything.
- rswerve 9mo agoYes, this is my main weather app and I think I've recommended it here before. There's another app that's slightly less elegant, but has more knobs to turn in Weathergraph. https://weathergraph.app/ https://weathergraph.app/
- pasc1878 9mo agoAlso see weathergraph that does similar graph and shows the temps etc in a downwards colum,n as well
- password4321 9mo agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squared.meteogram.pro https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squa... offers Android users the chance to customize a home screen widget with similar info.
- johns 9mo agoI liked that idea but found it a little busy so I started working on the weather layout I always wish I had. Heavily inspired by Weather Line, Dark Sky, NOAA line view but attempting to make it single screen: https://www.threads.com/@johnsheehan/post/DTHnd_HDbRM https://www.threads.com/@johnsheehan/post/DTHnd_HDbRM
- simonmales 9mo agoI was a big fan, the original version was called forecast.io. It was a rare example at the time when it was _the_ webapp better than any existing 'native' apps.
- simonmales 9mo agoAs a fan of webapps, https://yr.no https://yr.no is a good no-frills weather webapp.
- fnord77 9mo agoClearly the author didn't "obsess over how people would actually use" the gallery function on his web page Look at image. Scroll down to find the next image button. Scroll back up to look at image. On desktop
- reffaelwallen 9mo agoI am surprised no one mentioned Carrot as a replacement! I have been using it for years. they don't have their own source of data, they are mostly a good UI, and you need to select a data source like Apple Weather or others.
- rabeener 9mo ago+1 to Carrot. I’m a huge fan. The annual subscription is pricey but I travel a lot and it’s consistently one of the most accurate apps I’ve used and I tried a bunch! They even have an “I miss Dark Sky” setting that makes the UI a clone of Dark Sky
- withzombies 9mo agoThey also added the "Inline" theme which is a copy of Dark Sky's
- drkrab 9mo agoI’m surprised how many places in the world measure rain in percentage chance. Must be a metropolitan concept. Here in Denmark, weather reports estimate mm/hr - the amount of rain. Maybe it’s our agricultural inheritance?
- gdulli 9mo agoIf you're deciding whether to dress and prepare for rain you're more curious about whether it will rain or not than the amount.
- chrneu 9mo agoMost places I look at report both probability and give a measurement prediction. So it would be like "60% chance of rain after 2pm, total amount less than 1/10th of an inch"
- tonfa 9mo agoMeteoswiss has timeserie histogram with of amount of rain with confidence intervals (10th and 90th quantile) It tells you all you need to know at a glance :) e.g. see https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/images/1904/website/weather/weather-and-climate-from-a-to-z/Wahrscheinlichkeit_von_Prognose_abb_4_en.jpg/Wahrscheinlichkeit_von_Prognose_abb_4_en.jpg https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/images/1904/website/weather/... (from https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/weather/weather-and-climate-from-a-to-z/probability-in-forecasts.html https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/weather/weather-and-climate-...)
- antirez 9mo agoThe two things are not strictly related, you could have 30% chance of heavy rain, or 90% chance of light rain. Both are needed and many apps have both.
- blackguardx 9mo agomm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.
- somewhereoutth 9mo agoRain radar is something I'm always looking at online, it's easy to fast forward from an hour back and see whats about to hit you. I think that would make a great single purpose mobile app - automatically knows where the sources of information are and shows you the rain - where it was, and where it is going.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoPrevious discussions (and submissions by OP): 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115
- dang 9mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799 - July 2024 (196 comments) A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 - March 2023 (251 comments)
- a-dub 9mo agoit always felt to me like the major innovation behind darksky was the clever exploitation of newly broadly available precision gps. prior to darksky, i'd look at the radar picture on my smartphone and the pin where i was to try and figure out when it would start raining, darksky seemed to just package this really nicely with visualizations and notifications. (and yes, the visualizations were beautiful, but the real key was being able to see exactly where one was with respect to the radar picture and to be able to use already existing forward predictions of the radar picture in conjunction with precise gps to generate timeseries/events.)
- daemonologist 9mo agoIt's amazing to me that nobody has been able to match their UX (Apple in particular - how did they fumble the acquisition so badly?). The Weather Channel by most accounts has the best model but one of the worst websites of all time. live.xweather.com (formerly Aeris) is kind of close, but is basically an ad for their API/commercial subscriptions and not really built for day-to-day use. Some of the open source clones have the UI 80% of the way there but their forecasts aren't as accurate. I've settled on using the built-in Android weather app, but it pales in comparison to Dark Sky, in every respect.
- NetMageSCW 9mo agoCarrot is a pay app but it has a vertical view that matches Dark Sky in everything but Map, and I use it all the time, mostly with Apple Weather as the source (no source is as good as Dark Sky was (and I compared Dark Sky and Apple Weather when both were overlapping), the others have not been as good at my location). I don’t know if Carrot can use Apple Weather as a source on Android. Also it seems like the Android version is not in active development.
- whyenot 9mo agoOne of the things that made Dark Sky so great was its simplicity and focus. Apple Weather has added many of DS’s features over the past few years, but it’s so much more busy and dense with information. This is a problem that Carrot Weather and many of the other apps mentioned in the comments here also have. There was something very special about that app, and I really do miss it (also Apollo, Google Reader, Gaia GPS, and all the other apps that were canceled or turned into bloated monstrosities before their time).
- Leftium 9mo agoOn https://weather-sense.leftium.com https://weather-sense.leftium.com the colored boxes in the legend at the top are actually checkboxes. Toggle only the stats you're interested in! The toggle is persisted to localStorage. I plan to add more stats, like wind speed and direction, but they will all be toggle-able.
- tomaskafka 9mo agoFor anyone mourning Dark Sky, I make Weathergraph - visual weather app, which has the Dark Sky-like vertical view as an optional data layout. It's shown in the middle screenshot at https://weathergraph.app https://weathergraph.app (on desktop, mobile users can check https://impresskit.net/image-download/9161183f-e118-4c75-8f87-9dd39ae1b943 https://impresskit.net/image-download/9161183f-e118-4c75-8f8... )
- Leftium 9mo ago> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands. So true. Open Meteo supports 28 different WMO weather condition codes[1]. Most weather apps only support half as many. (Just "rain" instead of light/moderate/heavy rain.) Showing all 28 is less helpful because of the noise. More useful just to show it might rain for a period of several hours vs oscillating between light rain and heavy rain. The light vs heavy precision wasn't worth it when there was high uncertainty whether it would even rain at all. So https://weather-sense.leftium.com https://weather-sense.leftium.com consolidates hours with similar weather conditions into a single segment by default. You can click on the weather icons at the left of the plots to toggle the original unconsolidated view. [1]: https://weather-sense.leftium.com/wmo-codes https://weather-sense.leftium.com/wmo-codes
- wilg 9mo agoI really like the primary graph in https://mercuryweather.app/ https://mercuryweather.app/
- kasperset 9mo agoNotable weather iOS app that I use or have used in the past are: Wetter: http://plot.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php http://plot.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php weatherstrip : https://www.weatherstrip.app https://www.weatherstrip.app
- acomjean 9mo agoWhen I’m riding my bike, I use the weather.gov weather graphs. It took me a little bit to read it at a glance, but it’s all the information for the next couple days in graph form. (2 more days a click away) They have the whole week summary on the main forecast page, but I find the graph really useful. Eg; https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3773&lon=-71.1251&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3773&lon=-7...
- rendaw 9mo agoLooking at the screenshots, Dark Sky does something bad that I think most other weather apps do badly as well. Specifically: each day has a range (low and high) but it's not clear whether the low is for the morning or evening, and they could be vastly different. You could have 10-15 one day then 0-10 the next day, and think "Ok, I'll go out tonight and bring a jacket but no hat since the lowest it'll get today is 10 and whoops, actually it's freezing by the time dinner's over. There are so many ways apps could do this better. Like showing a vertical line graph rather than discrete bars, with the lows inbetween days. Or if you want to keep the bars, make them angled, so the low is closer to the morning/night it's associated with. Or even show 3 temperatures, not just two! (one being the low for the previous or next day or whatever)
- pyxisapp 9mo agoHey, developer of a iOS App here. I created Pyxis (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6639617144 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6639617144) . The app is a location saving app but it also has weather forecast features. I think the hourly forecast I created shows what you might be looking for. It shows the highs and lows by the hour. I hope that solves the problem for you.
- vollmarj 9mo agoWe took a lot of inspiration from darksky and this post when designing the forecast tab in the Precip (YC W24) app. The app started out just as historical weather, but we recently added forecasts if you want to check it out. https://precip.ai https://precip.ai
- hbarka 9mo agoData visualization. This very phrase brought to mind Tableau. Their core principle was data visualization and then they were acquired by Salesforce and became enterprise software. A call to a eulogy for dear Tableau.
- niij 9mo agoAple software has gotten so much worse over the past few years. I'm back on Android. I suggest Weawow, which has both Android and iOS apps. Ad free.