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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

#61

Post by kseistrup »

Leftium wrote: post #60
kseistrup wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SI/metric units, please.

One of the reasons for my app was to quickly switch between F/C. Clicking the large temperature (in landscape mode) toggles between F/C. I think precipitation is always in mm, except for the short text summaries. ...but yes, making the units configurable was already requested and is planned in the rewrite.

Thanks, clicking on the large temperature does indeed — a bit unintuitively — toggle between °F and °C. If you're on a mobile. If you're visiting from a desktop computer, as was my original case, there is no large temperature to click on.

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

#62

Post by amelius »

JZL003 wrote: post #22

For any other person who wants more advanced weather, I like meteo-blue's multimodel graphs https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/multimodel/tex... Much more information dense, if less pretty but it's helpful to see a bunch of models to get a sense of the uncertainty. It's what meteorologists I know do often, and you can quickly learn which models are short vs long-term and uncheck them I do wish I could make…

Instead of showing multiple models, I prefer they run the same model multiple times with slightly different starting conditions. And then show error (probability) bands.

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

#63

Post by BrandoElFollito »

zie wrote: post #37

The US government has a public, free API for getting weather data, and it will spit out JSON even. http://api.weather.gov documentation here: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api I never understood why people go through all these other API's that consistently get shut down, cancelled or become pay for use eventually.

Maybe because they are not in the US

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

#64

Post by eps »

Very cool. Special kudos for the light and informative UI design.

One nitpick - with Geolocation option, if it is disabled at the browser level (all fields are greyed out), the app shows some forecast, but it's not clear for what location.

An idea - allow enabling multiple providers at once, have the app automatically validate their forecasts against the actual conditions and then, basically, rank them on accuracy. In theory this should allow determining providers that are good at forecasting for one's specific location.

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

#65

Post by vintermann »

Nice. A tip: as long as you're asking for position anyway, you might as well make the units default to the units used in that location. 99% of the time that's what we want.

Don't forget the clock, too. It's not quite as odd to use am/pm as it is to use imperial units, but it's still the wrong choice for all of Europe minus U.K.

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

#66

Post by skrebbel »

vsergeev wrote: post #15
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.

Locale, in practice on the web, is mostly about language (fortunately!). I’m Dutch in NL and my browser (and OS!) is set to prefer en-US. Most of my friends do too. Dutch software UI translations are terribly cringey.

To me, that means I prefer English UI text but it doesn’t suddenly mean I want my units in arms and ounces and firestoves or whatever weird shit you Anglosaxons do :-)

I recognize that formally this is me breaking the locale model, but if so, then that’s a flaw in the design of locales and not a flaw in me. At the risk of ranting a bit, the idea that I can’t have a Color Picker named “Color Picker” without also bending over and accepting Fahrenheit is just weird to me. Lumping all this stuff together (don’t get me started on number formatting!) into a single 5-character language-and-region code is just dumb. The model assumes one dimensional einheitswurst humans who do as they’re told in primary school, never move away from their home town and never learn a second language. It sucks.

Let’s be happy so many websites get this right and treat locale as a language selector only.

(Meta sidenote, “Einheitswurst”, literally “unit sausage” but kinda also “unity sausage” which gives this word for dullness a delightful political angle, has got to be the second-best word in the German language)

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

#67

Post by jnovek »

perfecto_maduro wrote: post #8
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…

What kind of changes are you looking for? and how would knowing the forecast help you prepare or avoid headaches? Anecdotally my headaches correlate with weather changes but was never able to pinpoint exactly the markers.

I’m in the same boat and contemporary headache research doesn’t have any clues yet (aside from the fact that it’s a real phenomenon and we’re not crazy) although it is an area of active research.

I can usually tell by intuition if weather is going to trigger things — I’ll even say, “it feels migrainey out” — but I don’t have one specific weather pattern that is clearly the cause.

That’s why I pay attention to the barometer. The barometer frequently predicts big, nonspecific weather changes so whenever I see one on the horizon I know that I might get a migraine when that happens.

Regarding preparation, I try to get stuff down so I can take it easy around the time when the pressure is shifting.

For example, later this afternoon the pressure is supposed to climb quite a bit so I’m getting critical blockers for work done this morning and then I’m going to visit the gym at lunch. It really helps my stress level if I can finish my plan for the day before a headache puts me out. I hope that makes some sense?

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

#68

Post by Luka78 »

goplayoutside wrote: post #14

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.

I would suggest trying https://www.meteosource.com where you can get all data including 10 day forecast with a text description. There is a free plan for developers with 7 days forecast and a reasonably priced Flexi plan with full data.

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

#69

Post by vsergeev »

skrebbel wrote: post #66
vsergeev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Locale, in practice on the web, is mostly about language (fortunately!). I’m Dutch in NL and my browser (and OS!) is set to prefer en-US. Most of my friends do too. Dutch software UI translations are terribly cringey. To me, that means I prefer English UI text but it doesn’t suddenly mean I want my units in arms and ounces and firestoves or whatever weird shit you Anglosaxons do :-) I recognize that formally this is…

Thanks, I've filed an issue that the locale shouldn't be used for units.

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

#70

Post by vsergeev »

askvictor wrote: post #45
vsergeev wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Australia at least (which uses metric), a lot of people use EN-US as the locale, as it's the default for so many things.

Thanks, filed an issue.
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