Comment by strict9
3 years 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.
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).
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.
Google's weather feature on Android does this :) They don't call it "high" and "low", instead calling it "day" and "night".
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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.
To be fair it's only useless 50% of the time
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
It becomes useless when it was 32 degrees at midnight. But now, as I sit here on a Thursday morning, it shows the low for today as 28 degrees and tomorrow as 40 degrees. What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out? Will it be closer to 40 or continue dropping and be closer to freezing? Is it safe to put my sensitive plants back outside? Perhaps it shows 28 again but is that for early Friday morning or late Friday night?
In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn. That also happens to be the time of day when most of us are first leaving the house. That's a pretty important piece of information to have and it isn't there at a glance.
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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.
Say it says “32F low for saturday”. Is it going to freeze friday night at 1am (aka sat morning) or sat at 11pm?
It's very rare that I need to know about what the weather was like a few hours in the past.
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Oh, that drives me insane. It makes it absolutely useless for figuring out how to dress for outdoor activities.
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.
Worth noting the facet you're criticizing is how Dark Sky did it.
And 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.
>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?
Counterpoint: the Beats and Shazam brands still exist.
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Whatever 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.
> I don't know what their problem is
Here are 195 reasons why Apple bought Dark Sky: https://i.imgur.com/5dkofIG.jpg
Have you noticed how many moves they've made to make it easy to give up your location privacy to Apple? Emergency SOS is the latest one, complete with lots of submarine news articles about how OMG It Saved My Life!! This paper has many many more examples: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
they've made to make it easy to give up your location privacy to Apple? Emergency SOS is the latest one
I look forward to your blog post where you detail your phone call to emergency services:
911: 911, what's your emergency?
You: I fell down the stairs and broke my leg. It's gushing blood everywhere!
911: What is your location?
You: Oh, no you don't! I'm not giving my location to anyone! You're just gonna have to GUESS where I am!
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To 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).
>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.
I've switched to Weather Underground 10-day view: 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.
Pretty happy with merrysky.net.
I've gone to windy.com for weather, which really isn't what is was meant for, but on a large screen it works fine.
> 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
I 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.
Ok, 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?
I 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.
I 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.
Even 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.
I 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.
It was good enough that I moved from android to iPhone when they killed the android version
Agreed. Very poor decision on Apple's part. They should have just rebranded it and kept as is.
Give https://weathergraph.app a try - it ticks more or less all of the boxes in this article. Only thing missing is the radar.
Any good alternatives since?
I'm a huge fan of a few government sponsored ones:
- A great simple one is YR: https://www.yr.no/en
- if you happen to be in Switzerland: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.admin.meteo..., 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.
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.
Windy is awesome, although a bit overkill if you just want to know if it's going to rain in your town later today.
I like Weawow. It's proven accurate regarding weather trends, but it tends to be overly dramatic. I'm guessing this is related to living in a valley, as the weather to the north and south seems to match their forecast better.
It has the data that's indispensable to me: precipitation amount per hour. I don't care as much about how likely it is to rain, I care about whether I'm going to get sprinkled on or drenched.
The wind and weather map is pretty nice.
I use Weawow, too, but it's UI is very cumbersome in terms of getting quickly to what you care about. I have Meteograms' widget on my homescreen to get precip/hr and the core metrics similar to the wunderground 10 day view, but I find it much easier to read a daily forecast presented in a more traditional manner so go from Meteogram (tactical) to Weawow (strategic) forecasts.
If 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.
I'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.
>$7 lifetime Premium Version
I presume you mean the $7 "For as long as the developer feels like it" Premium Version.
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https://merrysky.net/ comes pretty close!
https://helloweather.com/
My goTos are NOAA.gov and pirateweather.net
Apple also made the underlying API available for both iOS and Android. Someone is free to create a similar app.
> 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.
Yes 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…
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