Show HN: Do I need an umbrella today?
umbrellatoday.app
umbrellatoday.app
I basically really dislike bringing an umbrella with me, as it brings so much complexities. Take for example the case that you buy a too big and expensive umbrella (e.g. for golfers), it is actually a hassle to drag along - just by its weight and size. It is also something you will most likely lose during a company event, after one or two drinks . If you buy a small and cheap version, you won’t get sufficient protection due to the small surface. In addition, they tend to break quickly, and when this happens, you might as well not have had one with you in the first place.
The bottom line is that I believe that everyone wants to minimise their interaction with umbrellas. And in order to do so, you need to know if it's going to rain or not. That is exactly what this web app tries to solve, by basically sending you automated alerts just before you leave your doorsteps.
Btw, its not just for a rainy audience, it can be also used in sunny regions. If you are one of those lucky ones that live in a sunny region, you probably do not look at the weather forecast on a regular basis. As a pre-emptive measure, you can set up an alert to not get caught by surprise when it actually does rain.
Happy to have your feedback on the idea and execution!
Some ideas, just to improve the solution, they're not too important:
- The idea of introducing the city and then I have to click validate is not the usual thing to do, usually the user gets a dropdown where he/she selects the proper city. As Google does nowadays with the searchbar.
- I would like to see the current prediction the site is giving me for today. I just want to see that "it works" before I give you my email :)
-Could it all be in a single form? I don't like to go through "3 pages" for filling one field in each. I think you can simplify it.
- The grey bar confused me a little, I thought it was to fill in there some info.
Again, take it as a constructive feedback, in general I like the idea :D
Is the data being sold? What security measures have you taken? You're tying email addresses to physical locations, this is a goldmine of information for all sorts of actors.
It doesn't matter if there's only a 1% chance of rain if you're parading your sugar sculpture around town all day. Similarly a 90% chance of rain when you're driving to and from a friend's house can be largely ignored.
A good example is Seattle and surrounding areas. When I lived in central California, Southern California, and the Bay Area in California I used my umbrella many times a year.
In Seattle and the surrounding areas I've used my umbrella maybe 10 times in the last ~30 years.
Seattle gets much more total rain than those other places, and has many more rainy days, so it might seem odd that I'd use my umbrella much less frequently.
The difference is that in Seattle unless you are obsessive about having your umbrella with you at all times except maybe during the summer, you are going to get caught in the rain without it. After that happens a few times you realize that because most of the time our rain is not very intense you didn't actually get too wet--in the time it took to walk between buildings or between a building and your transportation you only got a little wet.
If that bothers you a hat or a hoodie will take care of it, without the annoyance of having to dedicate a hand to holding an umbrella.
When we do get the intense rain that will get you seriously soaked in a short time it usually only lasts a short time then it is back to the mild rain that your hat can handle.
Those 10 times I used my umbrella here? About half of them were shortly after I moved to here, before I figured out that going around one handed for at least half the year is way more annoying for not really much noticeable gain over getting a hat with a wide enough brim to keep the rain off my glasses.
The other half was recently after I installed gutter guards around my house and garage and made some adjustments to the drainage around the downspouts, and specifically went out during those brief periods of very intense rain to check that the gutter guards could handle the flow and the the water was ending up where it was supposed to end up.
I was first expecting the ability to see if I needed an umbrella _now_ compared to in the future.
Then I got stuck for a little while trying to change the location from SF, I couldn't tell where I needed to click or that I did end up focusing something. The top line to the form sort of looked like it was trying to be a material design field, and the card with SF in it looked like it was supposed to be editable - it is editable, I just happened to only be clicking on the pin (and didn't notice the slight state change when I found the input).
If you auto-detect a timezone, it's probably better to guess that as a default location vs SF?
For the input, yes happy to change that directly. Maybe adding a X would help to clear the current input.
As for the auto-detect of the location, this just needs a bit tweaking with the Google Maps API. I did not get to it yet, but I am happy to hear that this addition would be appreciated.
Happy to include the major feedbacks in the next first release (by tomorrow).
It's like my smarthome, I either automate or make a (smart) button. Taking out the phone is a no no, but there is certainly a place for stuff like this.
I really wish my Nest V3 was more hackable, it's in such a central location and I look at that thing so often... and it tells me so little.
Oh and as a Dutch person we already look at buienradar [0] a lot and buienalarm [1] is also pretty popular here, both do notifications (maybe not at custom times, more like in 10 min or so I think, to be honest I think the apps are wrong too often to really trust them).
I have an Echo Show (the one with the screen) in a central location in my kitchen. It is too busy showing me stupid jokes that I could ask it to tell me to actually give me any useful information.
When I have timers going, it doesn't even display the timer on the screen so I have to ask Alexa to tell me the timer status every few minutes. Sometimes it puts it in a tiny little font in the upper right hand corner as if stupid jokes are more important than the timer I am literally waiting on.
My favorite is when I'm cooking and I have background music on along with 4 or 5 timers running at the same time and it thinks the most important thing I want to see are the lyrics to the song that it's playing.
"Alexa, stop showing me lyrics" does nothing. "Alexa, leave the timer on the screen" does nothing. It's amazing how much improvement potential there is in these devices.
You can read more about it in the changelog here: https://umbrellatoday.app/#!/changelog
Try out the new feature by refreshing the homepage (perhaps also your cache): https://umbrellatoday.app.
The first day was amazing in terms of engagement, I posted a tweet about that: https://twitter.com/quantavenue/status/1485951753904435201
We are talking about hundreds of subscribers, and thousands of visitors.
More to follow.
That said: combining data for heuristics is a nice way to simply an onslaught of data. For example, the above graph might be nicely expressed by something similar to but not exactly like "expected rainfall" (which accounts for chance of rain but also intensity). For temperature, "feels like", combining the various factors that actually affect skin temperature - wind and moisture included [0] - is probably best.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill#Australian_apparent...
An umbrella whose handle lit up if there was rain in the forecast.
It was so fine, I'd want to carry it for anything over 50%, but I knew it was being a bit dandyish, so a decade and some later, nowadays I don't bring it with me unless it's actually raining.
Perhaps a future feature of this app would be not so much whether to carry an umbrella on a given day, but whether it is appropriate to carry a certain umbrella. I'm sure the owners of JS&S would have some insight!
> Hassle free, our AI will remind you of bringing an umbrella on a rainy day
Which made me to wonder whether it just guesses that based on the date and city name; might be nice to expand on both "AI" usage and weather sources.
Wasn't able to check that it works without entering email and setting a notification either (as some of the other comments mentioned already, it's what one may expect). Also as others mentioned, 3 forms seem unnecessary. And JS seems unnecessary as well.
I entered 'Sudbury, MA' --> NOK, 'Sudbury' validates to 'Greater Sudbury (CA)', 'Sudbury (MA)' --> NOK. Tried with a neighboring city in Massachusetts, 'Concord' --> Validates as fine but given the experience with Sudbury, it isn't obvious which of the ~35 Concords that there are in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord).
I'm guessing this is scoped to just California?
That being said, living in Ireland, I usually bring an umbrella anyway because the weather here is maliciously designed to give you trust issues.
I like my umbrella and I always have it with me in the special umbrella pocket of my bag.
1. Keep improving this!
2. Add a more general alert, for paid subscribers. I'd easily pay $5 or $10/month for something to just tell me what I need that day (and maybe when generally I'll need it)
All the weather apps (that I know of, I haven't researched this) show me the weather and then want ME to figure it out. I don't want to figure it out. If I can trust you, I'd rather lean on you.