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A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

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Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#11
The article makes it sound like Apple just used Dark Sky as a backend and threw everything else away.

In fact it seems that they inspired heavily from Dark Sky's UI as well. In my opinion iOS now has a very clever and polished Weather app that contains many of the features mentioned in the article.

Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/GYP3ym8

Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#12
Another Dark Sky thread, another opportunity to ask the community if anyone knows about Apple doing research with the barometers in their phones. Dark Sky claimed they 'did' but they never expanded on what that meant for them. Did they actually use the barometer data collected from the app? Or did it just get sent to /dev/null as I suspect?

And if Apple bought that code, did they use it themselves? Is Apple doing anything to improve weather forecast accuracy in the main weather models by running data assimilation on cleaned barometer data?

If not it is such a wasted opportunity that I just get so angry about. If so....please tell us more.

Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#13
post #6

Well, this is quite a detailed analysis and I don't want to take a dump on it because it's obviously a good analysis. BUT. Masterpiece? I don't think so. Dark Sky's data visualization was all shiny gold and not enough real science. Their radar map with all those pretty colors was super buggy, so much so that you couldn't trust it. If you move the map or zoom in, or pan around, the rain / radar data often would not mo…

It's interesting reading this comment, because this perfectly aligns with my experience using the app on Android back before Apple shut it down. I agree with all of the article's points on how intuitive and helpful the UI was, and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement. But the predictions were constantly wrong.

Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#14
post #8

It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items. The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult. I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparabl…

Can I just piggyback on this to shit on the iOS Weather app for a moment?

Whoever designed it doesn't understand the concept of daily max/min temperatures, and the daily low presented in the app is the lowest during that calendar day, rather than the forecast overnight low following the day. It drives me absolutely mad, because I can never reliably determine how cold it will get overnight without going into the hourly view (and even that could be inaccurate for fast-moving weather systems).

Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#17
post #8

It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items. The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult. I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparabl…

And it wasn't just how it looked either. Dark Sky was a weather app that was actually accurate for what you wanted it for.

It really frustrates me that Apple completely killed off the product. I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.

Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#19
post #12

Another Dark Sky thread, another opportunity to ask the community if anyone knows about Apple doing research with the barometers in their phones. Dark Sky claimed they 'did' but they never expanded on what that meant for them. Did they actually use the barometer data collected from the app? Or did it just get sent to /dev/null as I suspect? And if Apple bought that code, did they use it themselves? Is Apple doing any…

I suspect barometer data from phones would be junk unless you can correlate it with other data. The phone’s barometer is sensitive enough to detect the pressure difference (altitude change) of a few cm. That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather.

Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece

#20

I really miss Dark Sky. Apple choosing to kill the app was a huge mistake IMO. Despite them "integrating Dark Sky features" into Apple Weather, I still dislike the user interface and layout of Apple Weather in general. Dark Sky was everything I needed for weather. Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.

I agree that killing off the standalone app was a mistake. It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared.

> Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.

Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? It seems to me that their usual mode of operation is to completely ignore feedback, and then after a decade or so, they come back with some portion of it and act like it's a thing they completely invented.

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