This is absolutely brilliant. The only barrier I see to these new visual languages is the initial barrier to learning the language. Either way, I hope more human interface research starts exploring this avenue.
Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
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Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#12This would be incredible as a live background, both because it's aesthetically stunning, and also for the information it can provide at a glance. I don't know enough about iOS to know whether (weather?) that's possible or not.
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#13Do you have any plans to port it to Android. Would love to try out the app.
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#14I think this goes a bit too much in the "imprecise" direction, so much so that it doesn't convey actual useful information (at least in those images shown). First off, short-term weather forecasts are not inaccurate, for the most part, so knowing that the temperature will be 21C (±1 degree) is more informative than knowing it'll be "brownish mass". Secondly, the heatmap style makes more sense when it's overlaid on to…
I don't know...I don't care much about the specific degree of weather(fahrenheit has a finer integer resolution than celcius, but celcius users manage just fine talking about the weather without going to fractions). It's really irrelevant to my life what the exact temperature is between 68 and 80 degrees. I may adjust my plans if the temperature is outside that range, but not if it is within that range.
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#15I like the idea of leveraging our already powerful sense of vision and pattern matching to communicate the weather but I feel like this does more to hinder understanding than it does to facilitate it.
If you're going to use a visual language, why not use one that people already know and recognize instead of introducing new patterns/symbols that you have to learn?
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#16Beautiful! Mapping data into raw-er perceptual forms feels like a rich area for exploration, plus you get to flex coding and design skill at the same time. Any plans for an android port?
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#17While I still want to see the actual data, I would love this as the background for my weather display. For the same reason I like analog/digital watch combos: if you're just walking by, you can get a useful approximation, but the very precise data is still right there when you want it.
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#18I like the idea of leveraging our already powerful sense of vision and pattern matching to communicate the weather but I feel like this does more to hinder understanding than it does to facilitate it. If you're going to use a visual language, why not use one that people already know and recognize instead of introducing new patterns/symbols that you have to learn?
That's a very valid point. One of the main reasons for introducing a new visual language (apart from purely artistic ones) was to intentionally inject a dose of ambiguity into the readings. Our existing visual systems (words, numbers) are implying preciseness which is not always there with weather forecasts (it is decreasing the further away you go from the current point in time), and I was trying to break away from that.
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#19I like the app, it’s very intuitive, I’m considering making it my go-to weather resource. I think it could be improved by adding an hourly forecast - perhaps consider adding a slider for how the blob will change over the course of the next 24 hours?
Thanks! I'm not sure what you mean by hourly forecasts, you can already swipe left/right to change the observed point in time?
Re: Itinerant – a fuzzy weather forecast app
#20Beautiful! Mapping data into raw-er perceptual forms feels like a rich area for exploration, plus you get to flex coding and design skill at the same time. Any plans for an android port?
Thanks! I would love to do an Android build but time and resources (e.g. devices to test on) are scarce. I haven't ruled it out though, let's see how the iOS version fares financially ;)