When it gets to 17:30 each afternoon, I wonder whether I should head home from work ASAP so I can go out cycling. So I take a look at a weather app on my phone. And does it tell me what the weather's going to be like that evening? Usually not.
What I instead get is the current temperature, current barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and sometimes even a bunch of more detailed stuff that's meaningless to me, like humidity.
Why does every weather app insist on telling you how the weather is right now?
When you watch weather forecasts on TV they don't spend their prime moment (i.e. their live-tile presence) telling you what it's like outside right now, they tell you how it's going to be.
So why do weather apps take up precious space and that glance moment by telling you what you already know, or can tell with a simple glance out of the window?
After living with the Microsoft Weather app for the past year or so, I've found it to be woefully inaccurate, so I've been through several different weather apps over the past couple of months (I currently have 4 on my home screen) and I've yet to find satisfaction with any of them.
Aside from the obvious desire for accuracy, here's my very simple wishlist:
Let's take The Weather Channel app as an example. Aside from its dated styling, it uses the wide tile to show me the current temperature and 'sky conditions' (sunny, rainy, etc.). And then the reverse shows the next 3 days' average temperature and sky conditions. This means that if it's going to rain tomorrow between 1500 and 1600, The Weather Channel app will simply show a raincloud and an average temperature for the entire day. That's not far from being useless.
And worse, with almost all apps, once you've started the full app they show you even more detailed information about the current conditions. I don't need to know the current humidity, the wind speed, etc. I want to know what the weather is going to be doing over the next few hours and days. It's as if the developer has found a web service which delivers a plethora of information, and they feel that they must display it all.
And showing me a radar map doesn't help either. I'm no meteorologist and seeing a lot of clouds coming my way doesn't really inform me what's going to happen.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a weather app that meets my fairly basic criteria?
Does anyone else share my frustrations with weather apps? It strikes me that the first weather app probably made a big deal of showing the current weather graphically on a home or lock screen, and all others have followed. Since then, every newly-built weather app has just copied this model and no-one seems to have considered what might be useful to know in a glance.
What I instead get is the current temperature, current barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and sometimes even a bunch of more detailed stuff that's meaningless to me, like humidity.
Why does every weather app insist on telling you how the weather is right now?
When you watch weather forecasts on TV they don't spend their prime moment (i.e. their live-tile presence) telling you what it's like outside right now, they tell you how it's going to be.
So why do weather apps take up precious space and that glance moment by telling you what you already know, or can tell with a simple glance out of the window?
After living with the Microsoft Weather app for the past year or so, I've found it to be woefully inaccurate, so I've been through several different weather apps over the past couple of months (I currently have 4 on my home screen) and I've yet to find satisfaction with any of them.
Aside from the obvious desire for accuracy, here's my very simple wishlist:
- A live tile which shows the weather over the next few hours. The wider tile should show more hours than the medium tile. And the information I want is simply temperature and whether to expect rain or sunshine.
- The reverse of the live tile should show the forecast for the next few days. Again, the wider tile should show more days than the medium tile.
Let's take The Weather Channel app as an example. Aside from its dated styling, it uses the wide tile to show me the current temperature and 'sky conditions' (sunny, rainy, etc.). And then the reverse shows the next 3 days' average temperature and sky conditions. This means that if it's going to rain tomorrow between 1500 and 1600, The Weather Channel app will simply show a raincloud and an average temperature for the entire day. That's not far from being useless.
And worse, with almost all apps, once you've started the full app they show you even more detailed information about the current conditions. I don't need to know the current humidity, the wind speed, etc. I want to know what the weather is going to be doing over the next few hours and days. It's as if the developer has found a web service which delivers a plethora of information, and they feel that they must display it all.
And showing me a radar map doesn't help either. I'm no meteorologist and seeing a lot of clouds coming my way doesn't really inform me what's going to happen.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a weather app that meets my fairly basic criteria?
Does anyone else share my frustrations with weather apps? It strikes me that the first weather app probably made a big deal of showing the current weather graphically on a home or lock screen, and all others have followed. Since then, every newly-built weather app has just copied this model and no-one seems to have considered what might be useful to know in a glance.
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