Show HN: A new, clean, and concise look at weather from My-Cast | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A new, clean, and concise look at weather from My-Cast

5 pointsyellowbkpk6 comments

We just released a new weather website using all sorts of awesome web technologies. We use ModestMaps to show tiled, animated radar and satellite data, Raphael.js to show historical averages and record high/lows, and MapQuest's new Nominatim service sitting on top of OpenStreetMap to do location lookups.

We're really proud of this site and would love to hear your feedback and to have try it out:

http://preview.my-cast.com/

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I like it. My first instinct was to click on the radar to expand it (maybe because I'm trying to determine if I'll need a kayak to get to work tomorrow in PHL). I like that the timestamps for the radar frames were converted from GMT/Zulu for me.

Your hourly forecast is nice and clean. Have you considered adding greater detail to the precipitation icons? Percent probability or estimated total QPF? Either way, I think this is an easier presentation than the hourly weather graphs on NWS.

Bottom line, I'll keep checking back to see how things develop.

EDIT: Forgot to add - good job making the map responsive to zooming and panning. That is one thing that drives me nuts with many radar/map implementations.

Thanks for the feedback! You have NO IDEA how much work went into developing a performant tiled & animated map. Modest Maps was a very good base to build on and we tried several other options before we went with MM.

I can imagine it was a significant effort considering all of the horrible implementations I've seen.

Hmmm. Is it attempting to geolocate me? If so, it keeps saying I'm in Minneapolis when I'm actually in New York. My first instinct was then to type my location in, but it took me a second since I expected the search box to be so much more prominent (I guess since my typical weather checking approach is: 1. Go to weather.com 2. Type in search box smack in the middle of the page)

Seems very cool, though. I would definitely use it.

This first iteration doesn't geolocate ... it's on the top of the list for the next release, though!

Clickable link: http://preview.my-cast.com/

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