81–90 of 157 posts
Doesn't seem to be available in the EU. Yet another US-only app with US-only weather, I guess, like countless others… "Obsessing" over your icons and user interface won't make your app useful to people you explicitly do not provide your app to.
I have always had a ton of respect for the Dark Sky devs. I love the work that goes into designing interfaces that make sense of complex datasets intuitively, and I feel like Dark Sky was a textbook example. I’m genuinely really excited to try this out.
We don't care about a Weather app. Very easy to do and there are millions of it. What is missing is good freely accessible data /api for weather info. Most free one are disappearing and frustratingly in most countries, the weather agency you pay with your tax will not provide it for you.
I want something that integrates into my life very minimally and just gives me the information I need when I need it. Most weather apps fail at this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do you collect any data?? There are like, billions of internet-connected barometers in the world that are not used in weather models. I don’t know if Acme has any of that in mind, but there is plenty of good reason for a weather app to collect data from phones. I know @counters may disagree with me, but I believe there are opportunities to improve short term forecast accuracy using data collected from phones. A…
> I believe there are opportunities to improve short term forecast accuracy using data collected from phones. Alright, fair point. That could be a reasonable use case. But judging by their advertised "Community reports" feature, Acme doesn't seem to be doing this. And even if they did, this feature should be opt-in, and their privacy policy should only apply for those users. > Also, pretty much every day, all the app…
Smartphones are personal computers. They spend most of their time in pockets and controlled indoor environments. This ambient data is of no use to anyone, which is why there's still a market for home weather stations, whose sensors are typically placed outside.
Doesn't seem to be available in the EU. Yet another US-only app with US-only weather, I guess, like countless others… "Obsessing" over your icons and user interface won't make your app useful to people you explicitly do not provide your app to.
Try your local weather app. Here in Switzerland the MeteoSwiss app is absolutely wonderful, and has all these main features: - Uncertainty bands in the forecast (the bands are a better UX than more lines imo) - User-supplied reports - Many many many different maps (snow / cloud / wind / sunshine / air quality / etc) - Alerts (not notifications, but real alerts to watch out for something) Plus many more other features…
My comment was a critique of a launching approach that I find annoying, because I would never dare to launch an app ignoring most of the world.
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Never understood using that metric, doesn’t temp and wind give you enough info? Genuine question
The "feels like" metric is more closely tied to human stress and safety than raw temperature. In cold weather (wind chill), wind strips away the thin warm layer of air next to your skin, so you lose heat faster. Hence, "feels colder". In hot weather (heat index), humidity slows sweat evaporation, so your body can't cool itself as effectively. Hence, "feels hotter". So it's a lot more useful for decision-making (like…
How are weather apps still relevant, let alone profitable enough to build a company around? This problem has been solved years ago. All the app needs to do is hook up to one or more data providers, and show some stats and pretty graphs. It's essentially a read-only frontend to an API. There are plenty of options to choose from on every platform, including not using an app at all. The features this ad promotes all see…
You are not wrong, except at scale it gets complicated quickly. For starters, to support large user numbers, you’re going to have to process your own grib2 data for radar and turn them into tiles at zoom levels. It takes about 24 cores with a GPU to do CONUS, Canada, Alaska, Pacific and Caribbean data. This should be 2x for redundancy. Even being cheap with main processing in my basement (gen power, backup internet)…
But then again, we don't know whether this company is maintaining this infra themselves, or if they're paying for API access. Besides, if anything, running their own servers is often the more cost-effective option, so the details you mention might not matter in practice.
My incredulity has more to do with the profitability of this type of software, considering that the free options are good enough for the average person, and that the features promoted in the article are hardly innovative.
> There is no money to be made without whoring out your user’s privacy.
Well, I do object to that. It's certainly possible to sustain a profitable business without selling out your users' data. It may not be as profitable as the advertising model, which is often too enticing for companies to ignore. This company explicitly says that their income comes directly from customers, so apparently I'm underestimating the amount of people who find these features valuable enough to pay for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try your local weather app. Here in Switzerland the MeteoSwiss app is absolutely wonderful, and has all these main features: - Uncertainty bands in the forecast (the bands are a better UX than more lines imo) - User-supplied reports - Many many many different maps (snow / cloud / wind / sunshine / air quality / etc) - Alerts (not notifications, but real alerts to watch out for something) Plus many more other features…
I actually use (and pay a subscription for) Windy, which is local (EU) and has data from a multitude of providers (some of which aren't free). My comment was a critique of a launching approach that I find annoying, because I would never dare to launch an app ignoring most of the world.
Doesn't seem to be available in the EU. Yet another US-only app with US-only weather, I guess, like countless others… "Obsessing" over your icons and user interface won't make your app useful to people you explicitly do not provide your app to.
> So let’s try this again…
At this point, I think that this is just going to get bought out by OpenAI.
Won't be totally surprised to see that outcome.