Today I’m going to review five different apps that tell you something about the weather. There seems to be a lot of innovation in this area right now and travelers are benefiting from the competition. When on the road, knowing what’s going on before and after you get there – (sometimes within the next 10 minutes!) – can make all the difference to your plans.
Sol: $1.99
I’ve had this app the longest of all the ones reviewed here and I’m still intrigued with its simplicity and elegance. Sol is geared to give you precise timings on the Sun’s activity with a presentation inspired by a sundial. You can find the obvious information easily including Sunrise and Sunset but readily available are the times for Solar midnight, Solar Noon, Astronomical/Nautical/Civil Twilight and the golden hour among others. Travelers take note – the golden hour is a favorite of photographers and movie makers for the perfect lighting conditions. Additionally, Sol reports when you are leading up to and have past a Solstice and Equinox, a favorite of mine in the Pacific Northwest where we covet every ray of sunlight.
But perhaps the coolest feature Sol has is time-travel, yep time travel. You can pick dates in the past and future and see what all Sunlight conditions are on those dates. This dial-a-date is extremely clever and for those of you who aren’t software engineers we all owe the Sol team led by Alec Vance a tip-of-the-hat for implementing the challenging math behind the scenes. Not to be left out are Josh Warren and John Barousse for their contributions to the design and graphics which make Sol a pleasure to use. (who came up with the animated clouds? love that.)
In a way Sol is perfect just as is. It does exactly what it sets out to do and doesn’t attempt to over-fit features for the sake of those feature. My day job for the last 20 years has been as a software engineer and then leader of engineers and Sol distinctly delivers a product with a visceral attention to detail and unwavering focus. Nice job Alec and team.
One final note – many of the Sol features works when you aren’t connected to the internet – a nice perk when on the road and not connected to wifi or cellular networks.
Living Earth: $1.99
I love this app for the beauty of it but the utility is equally impressive. First and foremost Living Earth gives you a stunning visual 3D view of our planet earth with the weather superimposed across the surface. As a user you can zoom in impressively close to see regional weather or zoom out to make the earth hang in space. And it spins! With a gentle swipe and you can set the earth in motion that provides you with an eerie sense of other worldliness . The runs head-to-head on features in this review, providing all of visual candy and utility at a competitive price.
Apart from the visual impact and elegant design the app gives you the typical utility of a 7 day forecast and with the first 3 of those days available at the hourly level. I used this app extensively when we were in Spain. Not only did it perform well but the ‘global view’ of our location on the planet was very grounding in terms of local context.
Haze: $2.99
Haze makes clever use of strong visuals and gestures to provide you with daylight information including Sunrise, Sunset, hours of Sunlight, hours of UV light and percentage of clouds. Then comes temperature; high, low, wind direction and speed. Finally you get precipitation, barometric pressure, humidity, rain-fall and whether or not you should bring an umbrella.
The background image is a conveyor-belt-like indicator that flows upwards or downwards telling you if (for example) the temperature is in the rise or falling. Getting to all of this information is through gesture use and strategic tapping of the elements on screen.
At first, I was confused by Haze. The total reliance on gestures and the lack of indication that more weather information was available was lost on me for the entire first day of use. But after that, I got use to the minimalist approach and it’s no problem now.
Haze seems a little expensive for what it delivers but the team have truly pushed the boundaries of mobile weather app design and should be applauded for their efforts.
Forecast: Free!
The folks over at Dark Sky who make a pretty big splash on KickStarter () offering short-term, very local forecasts have produced Forecast, an app that you can essentially ‘install’ on your phone without going through the iTunes or GooglePlay or Android app stores. You can add it to your phone by adding it to your homepage and it shows up with an icon and everything just like any other app.
Forecast is a very slick providing the high-utility of Sol and the slick interaction of Living Earth but with a differentiator. You can get high-quality near-term predictions of your local weather. An example is “Next Hour: Sprinkling for the hour” and “Light rain in the next 10 minutes”.
There is no weather application that I know of that is willing to attempt this degree of precision from Seattle to Barcelona to Sydney and the list goes on. It’s an impressive goal and equally impressive user experience.
Similar to Sol, Forecast offers very high utility with a clean (mostly) black and white interface and clever graphic animation to help convey information. All of the apps reviewed here are great in their own way but if you decide on just one – it’s hard to beat Free as a price for such a great app like Forecast.
Yahoo Weather: Free!
Recently Yahoo released their new weather app and it appears to aim at unseating apps like Living Earth. I come to that conclusion because it’s both information rich and attempts to deliver stunning beauty as a feature.
Not only is the weather data great, but it’s delivered upon a photographic backdrop of your locale. In a superb move to both utilize and honor talent wherever they find it, Yahoo credits the photographer who provides the backdrop photo. And, I kid you not, the photograph appears to be best-in-class often capturing shots of your city that are uniquely signature to that place. Where a unique photo isn’t available Yahoo defaults to a sky scene that is equally appreciated.
Elegance is the term that comes to mind when I use this app. Yahoo spent a lot of time “rounding the corners” of the experience and showing the world what a first-in-class app can provide. All the standard data is provide with the addition of clever-if-not-over-the-top animation of wind speed as well as Doppler radar maps.
Like Forecast above, free is a hard price point to beat and I expect the competition to drive more innovation in weather and local information services to your travels.