71–80 of 255 posts
It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design.
To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened
Dark Sky was okay. As detailed here, it does a great job of centering on the actual user needs of weather app users. Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot. Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basica…
Carrot Weather added the "inline" view which replicates Dark Sky pretty well. [1] It's been an easy transition for me, although Carrot is more expensive. [1]: http://meetcarrot.com/weather/goodbyedarksky.html
Well, I tried to install this on Android and was met with "unable to connect to server." I wonder if Carrot is using the Dark Sky API.
Related: Weather apps could in general be better, not just in terms of visualization. One thing which always annoys me is how they handle rain predictions. They give "probabilities" for rain. But what do those mean? The probability that it rains for at least one minute in the given time frame? And with at least x mm/inches of rain coming down? And isn't a low probability of short and weak rain totally different from…
Meanwhile the 'probability' listed in forecasts is also well defined as an expected value - it's (probability of X% rain coverage) * (X %), over all X. (Rain is defined as > .01")
I have moved from Dark Sky to Weather Strip: https://www.weatherstrip.app It does a really nice job of showing me most of what Dark Sky showed, in a similarly easy-to-glance-at format once I spent a little time learning to read its graphs. I think Carrot Weather has a lot of graphs directly ripped off from Dark Sky but the constant attempts to upsell me to a subscription plan while I was playing with it really turned…
Shout out to FlowX on Android. ( https://flowx.io/ ) The best weather app I've ever used. Much thanks to the founder Duane & his partner for the ongoing development
> Page not found (404) > Request Method: GET > Request URL: http://flowx.io/privacy/ > Raised by: wagtail.core.views.serve
> You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.
They tout excellent app UX but the website has a lot of rough edges visually.
Again, not discounting their work. I'm still going to install and try out, but initial impressions matter.
Dark Sky was okay. As detailed here, it does a great job of centering on the actual user needs of weather app users. Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot. Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basica…
I live in Montreal and I loved Dark Sky. So I'll disagree.