Comment by mason55
3 years ago
I live in the mountains in Colorado and DarkSky was by far the best UX for viewing upcoming weather. The way they presented projected hourly snowfall was especially good, as was the projected snowfall by day.
With Apple Weather, you get a snow icon and a percentage for future days. For DarkSky it was an actual projected snowfall amounts, which is so much more useful. Are we expecting 2 inches? Or 20?
On a daily basis, Dark Sky had a great graph of hourly projections. Apple Weather has a bar chart with no numbers unless you hover on each bar, and it will project 8 hours of snow in the hourly view but then the bar chart only shows a bar on one hour.
I said it was okay. Just don’t feel like it had the most incredible human-centric weather UI that is often touted for it.
When I evaluated it, my main concerns were things like ‘am I gonna have to dig the car out in the morning?’ and ‘is that thunderstorm heading right for me or just to one side?’ - and those were not things I felt Dark Sky did particularly well. The old weatherspark visualizations used to be much better, but they seem to have vanished.
Which is fine! Tools can be great for some things and not others! I just find it surprising that it is touted as having hot weather presentation ‘right’. I’m still waiting for better.
Try tapping on the icon in Apple Weather to see a graph of various elements.