8 ms·

Dark 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 argumen

• staindk 10mo ago
  Kind 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 10mo ago
  Yes! 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
      it doesn't work nearly as well. i'm not sure why, but the predictions are significantly worse than dark sky's were
      • woodwireandfood 10mo ago
        I agree. One of the weird things is that the precipitation map will show rain coming that doesn't show anywhere else in the Weather app. Nearly every time that happens, the map is the one that's correct. And usually forecast.weather.gov will align with the map as well (and provide a better forecast than the app).
        • crazygringo 10mo ago
          But that's the point. The map is based on the Dark Sky algorithm and only goes out an hour or so. And that's where the next-hour precipitation graph comes from -- and I've never seen them not match. Everything else is standard weather forecasts. Dark Sky itself worked the same way. It wasn't making 6-hour forecasts using its 1-hour algorithm. The results would have been terrible. This is why I don't understand the complaints that iOS precipitation accuracy is worse than Dark Sky's. The map works the same way. The chart works the same way. Complaints about UX I get. But not the complaints about a supposed fall in precipitation accuracy. I get that it's a common trope that products always supposedly get worse once they're bought. But in this case, in terms of accuracy, I just don't think it's true. And remember, Apple would have zero reason to worsen the quality. The whole point of buying it was to improve iOS weather. Which it did.
          • 3333333331 10mo ago
            to each their own, but i used darksky for years as a daily bicycle commuter and found it to be profoundly accurate--to the point where i could use it to find clear patches of 15-20min to ride home in. there was a marked decline in the reliability & accuracy of the information provided to me once i was forced to switch to apple weather
            • crazygringo 10mo ago
              I dunno. I literally use Apple Weather for that (can I run an errand in the next 25 min before the rain comes back) and it works the same as it did with Dark Sky. No decline that I've noticed. Like, it doesn't suddenly start raining after only 10 min when the app said I'd have 25 min.
• crazygringo 10mo ago
  > Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate Is it not? The rainfall-per-minute over the next hour on iOS seems about the same accuracy as Dark Sky had -- I used Dark Sky for years. It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough, same as iOS did after. You can even scrub the precipitation map predictions and they look the same to me. I know the Dark Sky prediction accuracy was greatly dependent on where you lived -- this is something that was widely discussed back in the day. If you've seen a drop in accuracy, did you simply move?
  • postalcoder 10mo ago
    I used the Dark Sky app since it came out in 2012. I used to consistently get notifications about precipitation with Dark Sky, that were consistently accurate. The Apple weather application seems less motivated to send me notifications with any sort of regularity. I almost never get them now, even with fresh iOS installs. I haven't moved either. And just anecdotally, Dark Sky was a delight to use. Apple Maps makes it a chore to extract the same utility from their app.
    • crazygringo 10mo ago
      OK, notifications aren't the same as accuracy though. Neither is delight. I'm just talking about the supposed drop in accuracy that I just don't see. (And Apple notifications are a mess generally. I constantly have notifications for something yesterday only show up today. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Weather specifically, their whole notification priority system is borked.)
      • natebc 10mo ago
        I think the point was (and i'm certain my experience is) that with Apple Weather you just don't get the notifications at all (or rarely do) so it's very hard to get a feeling as to how accurate they are.
        • postalcoder 10mo ago
• joshstrange 10mo ago
  Agreed, that’s what won me over to Dark Sky. Now I use Carrot Weather and like that a lot, the “it’s going to rain hard in XX minutes” notifications are awesome, especially with a dog. I’ve gotten that notification close to a normal time I’d take the dog out and been able to run him outside before it pours rain for the next hour.
• themadturk 10mo ago
  I've never understood why Apple didn't adapt Dark Sky's design lessons. Apple Weather is functional, but dull.