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Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

blog.darksky.net

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Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#241

Post by fileyfood500 »

abduhl wrote: post #180
wpietri wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Comments here show that people had a good thing. Apple took it away from them to get a competitive advantage.

What did Apple take away here? The app icon? Android support has been gone since 2020 and most (all?) of the features of Dark Sky are integrated (and enhanced apparently) into iOS 16. So you have a situation where all the people that "had a good thing" now have it by default without an extra app they have to click on and now more people will have that good thing by default for free. If anything, this is anti-anti-com…

Apple produced a weather app and bought out a leading competitor. This hurts the consumer because there is a loss of consumer choice and competition in the space.

In a related vein, it's exciting that Apple is investing in Apple Maps as a competitor to Google Maps, especially since Google bought out Waze a few years ago.

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#242

Post by mstade »

benbristow wrote: post #234
beefman wrote: post #187

Folks here said the new Weather app has the same info. I upgraded to iOS 16 about a year before I normally would just to check this. And nope, it doesn't have the one feature I use Dark Sky for – the one feature no other weather app has: the ability to see what the weather was yesterday. It's what Dark Sky calls "Time Machine". (Can't believe Apple let them use this name this long, now that I think of it.) (I support…

I've noticed the Weather app to be pretty unreliable to be fair. The amount of times I've looked out the window recently when my phone says it's raining but it's completely dry or vice-versa or it says it's definitely going to rain and it doesn't. Perhaps no weather app is good enough to deal with Scottish (specifically Glaswegian-ish) weather :)

Same here in Stockholm! WeatherPro seems to hold up pretty well, but the built in weather app is mostly useless. Pretty though!

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#243

Post by mstade »

can16358p wrote: post #201
beefman wrote: post #187

Folks here said the new Weather app has the same info. I upgraded to iOS 16 about a year before I normally would just to check this. And nope, it doesn't have the one feature I use Dark Sky for – the one feature no other weather app has: the ability to see what the weather was yesterday. It's what Dark Sky calls "Time Machine". (Can't believe Apple let them use this name this long, now that I think of it.) (I support…

Weather app doesn't even show the hour before. I get it, less features = simpler user interface and less code maintenance... but they could at least start at current hour BUT provide ability to scroll back in time for a few days, perhaps showing that data with 0.5 opacity faded to indicate that the data is no longer relevant (past). Otherwise I LOVE the updated weather app in iOS 16 where you can see many data points…

Doesn't the graph show exactly what you're asking for? Anything before the vertical line showing the current time shows the historical data for that day?

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#244

Post by suction »

benbristow wrote: post #234
beefman wrote: post #187

Folks here said the new Weather app has the same info. I upgraded to iOS 16 about a year before I normally would just to check this. And nope, it doesn't have the one feature I use Dark Sky for – the one feature no other weather app has: the ability to see what the weather was yesterday. It's what Dark Sky calls "Time Machine". (Can't believe Apple let them use this name this long, now that I think of it.) (I support…

I've noticed the Weather app to be pretty unreliable to be fair. The amount of times I've looked out the window recently when my phone says it's raining but it's completely dry or vice-versa or it says it's definitely going to rain and it doesn't. Perhaps no weather app is good enough to deal with Scottish (specifically Glaswegian-ish) weather :)

Apple Weather's forecast is unusable in the whole of Europe because of the data providers they use. Pretty disappointing to have such a US-centric view on an app that's so integral to a smartphone. They either should work with European data providers or make the app unavailable outside of those markets similar to how they do it with the "news" app.

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#245

Post by vineyardmike »

jxramos wrote: post #233
hulitu wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want idiots. And then complain when their users are idiots.

I’ve been daydreaming about the possibility of OS support for semi-arbitrary plugins for apps and how those apps could expose certain things for the plug-in to utilize. It’s a very half-baked idea of mine but I’ve wondered if it’s possible to permit the baseline simplicity of an app while giving an outlet for power users to craft something useful atop them. I’m curious how certain apps even permit a plug in architect…

Like the sibling commented, that’s what open source is for.

BUT apple specifically has ExtensionKit, which is a library for arbitrary extensions in arbitrary apps. Of course, the host-app needs to support extensions and build it in. So your theorizing about a way for any app to have a plugin, its there. Many system apps in OSes have this feature, and many more apps (eg vscode) support it.

Realistically, web-apps are almost what you want too. Web-apps allow for pretty arbitrary extensions via browser plugins, which can modify the actual UI of the webpage, and make API calls to the backend (by acting as the JavaScript on the page). WebApps are basically open source though (or source available) by nature of how browsers work.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/extensionkit

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#246

Post by 71bw »

beefman wrote: post #187

Folks here said the new Weather app has the same info. I upgraded to iOS 16 about a year before I normally would just to check this. And nope, it doesn't have the one feature I use Dark Sky for – the one feature no other weather app has: the ability to see what the weather was yesterday. It's what Dark Sky calls "Time Machine". (Can't believe Apple let them use this name this long, now that I think of it.) (I support…

That was the best single feature in the UWP Weather app on Windows 10 Mobile. It allowed you to see past history data up to 25+ years I believe, hell, they even included a "Past highest/lowest" temperature for every single day so that you could see, that, for example, the lowest temperature on the 8th of August was in 1984.

Also the iOS Weather app uses Weather.com for its data, which is just plain unreliable in Europe.

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#247

Post by [deleted] »

suction wrote: post #244
benbristow wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the Weather app to be pretty unreliable to be fair. The amount of times I've looked out the window recently when my phone says it's raining but it's completely dry or vice-versa or it says it's definitely going to rain and it doesn't. Perhaps no weather app is good enough to deal with Scottish (specifically Glaswegian-ish) weather :)

Apple Weather's forecast is unusable in the whole of Europe because of the data providers they use. Pretty disappointing to have such a US-centric view on an app that's so integral to a smartphone. They either should work with European data providers or make the app unavailable outside of those markets similar to how they do it with the "news" app.

[deleted]

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#248

Post by bpye »

beefman wrote: post #187

Folks here said the new Weather app has the same info. I upgraded to iOS 16 about a year before I normally would just to check this. And nope, it doesn't have the one feature I use Dark Sky for – the one feature no other weather app has: the ability to see what the weather was yesterday. It's what Dark Sky calls "Time Machine". (Can't believe Apple let them use this name this long, now that I think of it.) (I support…

Environment Canada publish historical weather [0] as do the Met Office [1]. I also recently discovered that the BC government have their own air quality monitoring stations - and that data is also available [2].

[0] - https://climate.weather.gc.ca/index_e.html

[1] - https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...

[2] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-wate...

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#249

Post by anshumankmr »

Can someone explain what was great about dark sky? All I really know about it that it was an weather app acquired by Apple from some other discussions about it. It seemingly had a "Time Machine" feature to see the past weather but is that really a game changing feature? Was the UI good ?

Re: Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31

#250

Post by bpye »

emptybits wrote: post #202
jszymborski wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually used Darksky for the hourly percipitation forecast. It helped me time things out. For fellow Canadians who used it similarly, the Canadian Gov't has a pretty handy hourly forecast[0]. The radar is also nice [1]. [0] https://www.weather.gc.ca/forecast/hourly/qc-147_metric_e.ht... [1] https://www.weather.gc.ca/map_e.html?layers=radar&zoom=-1&ce...

Agree. I have trusted the Environment Canada forecasts for years. Web and basic app. The government-issued stuff isn't as featureful or pretty as some apps, but I go back to it every time because its track record here (Vancouver) has been good to me. I wish there was an API or non-scraping approach to retrieve the daily & hourly forecasts. With the popularity of open data policies on tax-funded public data... it seem…

I'm pretty sure this - https://api.weather.gc.ca/ - is what you're looking for. It looks like they expose lots of data via an API, including the 7 day forecast.

For example this should be the Vancouver forecast - https://dd.weather.gc.ca/citypage_weather/xml/BC/s0000141_e....

I think this is the hourly data - though in a slightly odd format - https://dd.weather.gc.ca/nowcasting/matrices/

Edit: Aha found the nowcast docs - https://eccc-msc.github.io/open-data/msc-data/nwp_nowcasting...

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