Comment by nonethewiser
3 years 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?
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.
Why not both? Keep the normal highs and lows we expect from our weather stations and websites, then display the temperature variance in a view that doesn't require you to drill into the app view clicks / drags.
I don't see any defensible opinion to let the lows be during/before sunrise.
Given that the suns movements are pretty predictable, it seems suboptimal to define counter to something that happens almost every day.
2 replies →
> 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.
Absolutely this, I think OP has an atypical mental model of the daily boundaries of temperature, we’ve been conditioned to think of daily highs and lows from radio and local news television forecasts. You can’t just look at the app in isolation of decades of social conditioning that predate the iPhone and weather apps.
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.
How about we categorise it by the day/night cycles like we have since before we walked on 2 legs? Not some arbitrary time model we created that happens to divide the night cycle at midnight. Daytime max, overnight min.
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.