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Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

briefsky.app

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Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#11

Post by cobythedog »

jnovek wrote: post #3

This (and every other Dark Sky replacement I've tried) is missing one feature that is crucial to me: hour-by-hour barometric pressure forecast. I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so signific…

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Windy (windy.com) offers that: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/windy-com-weather-radar/id1161...

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#12

Post by GiorgioG »

jnovek wrote: post #3

This (and every other Dark Sky replacement I've tried) is missing one feature that is crucial to me: hour-by-hour barometric pressure forecast. I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so signific…

CARROT (iOS) has it.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#13

Post by barometric »

jnovek wrote: post #3

This (and every other Dark Sky replacement I've tried) is missing one feature that is crucial to me: hour-by-hour barometric pressure forecast. I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so signific…

I’m in the same boat with weather pains, so I decided to make a site with an hourly barometric pressure forecast and history.

https://barometricpressure.today/

It’s currently tracking a lot of cities, so please check if you’re close to any, otherwise, I will soon add a search for specific locations.

I’m open to any feedback.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#14

Post by goplayoutside »

Is there a Dark Sky API replacement that provides brief text descriptions in the 10 day forecast yet?

When I checked the other day, it looked like Pirate Weather was still waiting on donations to fund the development work for that feature.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#15

Post by vsergeev »

Gys wrote: post #9

Would be nice if it automatically uses degrees Celcius instead of Fahrenheit if the location is Europe. Also for visibility and wind speed, km instead of mi.

I considered handling this with some coarse longitude heuristic, but settled on just using the browser's locale for now, so it should default to metric for non-US locales. In the metric setting, the visibility and wind speed will be km and km/h, respectively.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#17

Post by lostfocus »

manwe150 wrote: post #10
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

Can someone explain to me why weather data is seemingly hard to get/provide? Isn’t data from the US government (weather.gov) in the public domain and completely free? What did Dark Sky and similar provide on top?

For me, it was the history data. I could check if it snowed in the last couple days in a new location and whether it melted yet. With most weather apps, the furthest back I can see is midnight, which does not even answer the question of whether there are going to be puddles/snow/slush/ice on the ground that formed since the time I went to sleep.

Yes, absolutely this. Dark Sky was very generous with their historical data, none of the others is doing that.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#18

Post by vsergeev »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

Can someone explain to me why weather data is seemingly hard to get/provide? Isn’t data from the US government (weather.gov) in the public domain and completely free? What did Dark Sky and similar provide on top?

The main issue I ran into with the NWS API was a lack of stable conditions codes/icons (something like WMO codes that could be easily mapped). They encode some weird dynamic image URL that renders a summary of the weather, but isn't machine readable. I think they're deprecating it anyway. Otherwise, it had pretty much everything through one endpoint or another.

For the others, I tried to document the main limitations here: https://github.com/vsergeev/briefsky#unsupported-providers

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#19

Post by cnanney »

jnovek wrote: post #3

This (and every other Dark Sky replacement I've tried) is missing one feature that is crucial to me: hour-by-hour barometric pressure forecast. I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so signific…

For a web alternative, on https://merrysky.net/ you can expand "More charts" on the graph to see barometric pressure.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#20

Post by npilk »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

Can someone explain to me why weather data is seemingly hard to get/provide? Isn’t data from the US government (weather.gov) in the public domain and completely free? What did Dark Sky and similar provide on top?

I agree this data should be free and easy to access from the government.

Personally, I've found weather.gov APIs hard to work with. There's no geocoding included, and you can't even use lat, lon directly. But the bigger dealbreaker is that I have about a ~10-20% success rate querying any given endpoint, where sometimes I just get "An unexpected problem has occurred." And this is an automated twice-a-day query, so I don't think I'm hitting any rate limits...

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