Comment by jwestbury
3 years ago
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".
What if the low temperature is forecast to be at noon?
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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
If it's useless 50% of the time, it's untrustworthy 100% of the time.
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.
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.
They get brittle in colder weather? Never heard of this, can you explain a bit more?
So true…
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.
> In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn.
Probably true, and yet the counterexamples are when the temperature forecast is particularly important when I'm choosing what to wear. Any simplification of the temperature forecast into daily lows and highs will fail certain use cases, so I think it's very reasonable to make the daily lows and highs as well- and simply-defined as possible and provide an hourly forecast so that people can also check for the potential edge cases.
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> What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out?
Can’t you just check Friday’s temps? I’m not sure why you’d expect this info out of Thursday.
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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.
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.
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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.