WeatherKit
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
Here is Oslo: https://www.yr.no/en/content/1-72837/meteogram.svg
That’s mostly in jest though (sent from an iphone) but also because Apple bought darksky (which was my preferred weather api/source in the past) and I’d assume that’s a big part of/rolled into the weatherkit offerings now?
I don't know if Weather Kit will provide the same accuracy.
I'm in a process of switching to Open Weather Map right now, I started when apple announced Weather Kit to Dark Sky users via mail. But I will try this Norwegian API as well.
I ran the two in parallel for a few months to compare the alerts and accuracy. Weather won out.
Dark Sky app however always had a longstanding bug that it’d never show past radar, only future sliding predictions, so I guess both have their problems.
So I guess I'm saying that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...
Developed by a former colleague of mine. Open source and my favorite for 2h forecasts about upcoming rain in Germany.
Originally, it was envisaged that all services provided by the DWD to the general public for public dissemination via modern means of communication, such as mobile devices via an app, as specified in Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge (Explanatory Memorandum to the Government Draft of a First Law Amending the Law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 22). The Bundesrat has commented on this and raised competition law concerns about the tax-funded DWD making meteorological and climatological services available to the end consumer free of charge, because such a free charge constitutes an impediment to established private-sector providers and erects barriers to market entry for new providers or new offerings (explanatory memorandum to the government draft of a first law amending the law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 25). The version of Section 6 (2a) DWDG that has become law is based on the resolution recommendation and report of the Bundestag Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BT-Drucks. 18/12836, p. 2), according to which not all services provided by the DWD to the general public pursuant to Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge, but only those pursuant to Section 4 (1) Nos. 3 and 7 DWDG.Though then again not that surprising that they manage to publicly fund something and then ruin it, leaving the taxpayer in the worst condition. I believe there’s even no official source of laws online in Germany decades after the internet has made it cheap and easy to provide access to information.
Edit: not directly related but a fun fact: in Switzerland you can get a copy of the constitutional laws for free at any bookstore and it’s supposed to be understandable for normal citizens and not only for lawyers.
They also mention it on the gesetze-im-internet website: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hinweise.html
It seems that the Austrian way is much better though.
The person with the most freedom of speech in their bank accounts should be able to have the most say in how the government runs. Because they have most freedom of speech at stake.
Only the free app was deemed anticompetitive. All the data is available: Geoservers: https://maps.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (weather and warnings) https://cdc.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (climate infomarmation) https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/geodienste/geodienste.html (Overview)
You are also free to embed all the information from the website (maps, etc.) and there is also the raw data server: https://opendata.dwd.de/
Additionally, the weather service is a "state owned enterprise" expected to turn a profit.
So everyone who needs farm weather uses yr.no
After covid, I'm going to go talk to some politicians about our weather forecasting problem.
That aside you might make some progress talking to the Greens if you framed it as an environmental issue.
what do you mean? are there still restrictions in NZ?
Also, even if I didn't care, there's no guarantee any of the politicians will meet me maskless yet.
If yr.no weren't providing us free weather, we'd get a lot less done, because we wouldn't know the weather 2 or 3 days in advance because our forecasters do not tell us what is happening a 45 minute drive up a valley from here.
They also publish the data for free, such as map layers/radar https://opengeo.ncep.noaa.gov/geoserver/www/index.html or the weather forecasts https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/weather-climate-models/na...
In the past The Weather Channel lobbied to get public access shut down but failed but most people selling weather data compete by building improved forecasts, local knowledge, etc on top of NWS data. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get into the space.
I still don't really understand it.
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/5b3b826f79/weather-permittin...
My weather app has five weather models that cover NZ include a high resolution model from Expedition Marine, an NZ based meteorologist. I hope to bring model farming related weather data in the future.
The main issue with raw model data is that they are not adjusted for local altitude.
I think weather underground did i.e. until Apple gulped it.
This includes Apple Card, but also the recently introduced multi-week payment options Apple is offering to buy its products. (Previously offered by other services “for free.”)
I have no doubt that Apple is looking at how data is leaking across the ecosystem and is seeking to stop it as much as possible.
I’m curious to see what else is in the works.
Based on the emails that have come out from various trials, they want a 30% cut of everything, eventually including real world services mediated through the phone.
The benefit to Apple is the same reason that Google invests in Project Zero.
Higher consumer confidence that a product is safe = higher engagement = higher revenue.
https://www.twitter.com/techemails/status/148133934582287974...
I like what Apple is doing, but I've heard that rumor enough times from former employees who worked on this stuff, and people who've come out of meetings with the Safari guys, that I continue to be wary of Apple.
It’d be an embarrassment to emphasize their privacy advantage in their announcements only to throw away that trust in pursuit of a few pennies.
https://digiday.com/media/apple-skadnetwork/
> Apple Ads Attribution API (used by Search Ads campaigns) provides visibility into clickDate, adGroupId, creativeSetId. “This is a massive, and unfair, advantage Apple is giving to its own systems and advertisers,” said Sergio Serra, senior product manager at supply-side platform InMobi.
https://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/3-ways-apple-is-throwing-...
> Which is particularly interesting considering that late last week, Eric Seufert, a mobile strategist and editor of Mobile Dev Memo, discovered a settings option in the forthcoming iOS 14 that would give preferential treatment to Apple ads personalization.
(IDFA tracking is opt-in, Apple's tracking is opt-out)
I think it was clear from the beginning of Apple Pay that they’re running a very long term embrace-extend-extinguish on Visa and Mastercard, and everything in their product roadmap to date has been consistent with that, especially opening up native tap-to-pay acceptance on iPhones.
Not really? Apple sells ads and directly profits from recommending high-margin, exploitative apps on the App Store. Seeing as their 30% cut is a multi-billion dollar market, I wouldn't just call it a "slim opportunity". More like "a better way to optimize the money printer without the SEC shouting at us" or something.
I have no doubt that Apple is looking to exploit it to their exclusive advantage as much as possible, while marketing it under the guise of their privacy measures.
Apples’ “privacy” is that they retain monopoly control over my data. Basically they stiff arm the competition (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) and get to profit exclusively by spying on me.
That's a strange way to describe the situation where Apple is not allowing third parties to share your private data without your permission. Apple is doing exactly what you wanted in your first paragraph, which is to let you decide who gets access to your private data. If you only give it to Apple, that's YOU deciding to voluntarily grant Apple that monopoly. It's only a "monopoly" if YOU choose it to be.
If you want to download the Facebook app from the App Store and voluntarily give your private data to Facebook, Apple isn't standing in your way. Monopoly? Seriously, I have no idea what that complaint could possibly be based on.
> and get to profit exclusively by spying on me.
I'll set aside the weird claim that Apple is "spying" on you, as though you didn't know Apple is involved in the functioning of your device. Really I'm confused why exclusivity would be a grievance. You think it'd be better if Apple were giving your data to other companies so more companies could spy on you?
Calling what Apple does "privacy" is a sleight of hand. True privacy means my data is mine, I am not forced to share it with whatever random employees of a multinational corporation happen to be able to access it, it is not necessarily within the crosshairs of bulk warrants imposed on Apple by governments, and I have the option to refuse to allow it to be used to demographically and psychologically profile me for the purposes of advertising or anything else by any other entity including Apple.
What they are engaged in is the monopolization of user data, duplicitously dressed in the robes of "privacy".
No, I think it would be better if Apple stopped spying on me at all, full stop.
And regardless, if you don’t like it, the solution is entirely within your grasp. After all, there’s no law forcing you to reveal your private self to Apple.
No one is pretending Apple is a charity. Of course they do all this for obscene amounts of profit. But if we get stronger privacy as a side effect, I think that’s a generally okay situation.
Apple is almost too big to defeat. With the flip of a switch, they could turn course. (I would argue in many senses that they have.)
They're already obeying local governments as a central point of censorship and control. Even the FBI/NSA has them monitoring the files on your device.
Apple is too many functions wrapped up as a single legal entity. They have too much control, and they're growing bigger every year.
Source?
Credit card companies have been doing this for decades.
Edit: my bad for skimming too fast, I'm glad there's a REST API, that's unexpected and cool!
Looks like it's 500k calls per month per Apple Developer Program account, so essentially $99/yr. Not totally unreasonable pricing, although I wish I could buy it a la carte. It's a bit out of my price range for hobby projects. If I ever start developing apps for my family members (who mostly have iPhones at this point) though this will be a nice freebie to come with that. Ah well.
That limits the number of use cases quite dramatically.
Here's the pricing for those that might need >500k/mo. It looks like it won't be available until after this hits beta, but it looks to be $50/mo extra for each 1m calls (plus the price of a membership).
I hope they continue to support Darksky, at least until the Apple Weather app is on par with it.
Some bad news: iOS app support ends at the end of this year, and the API/website gets yanked next March.
I’m also interested in weather (*<|:o) or not it will be completely free to use, or if there will be some attempt to monetize (like the current Weather app takes you to that God-awful Weather Channel page, if you want anything other than a summary).
At least, I hope the built-in app finally becomes usable.
[UPDATED TO ADD]:
Looks like it’s sort of “the Google API” model (https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/get-started/).
If your app isn’t that popular (like most of mine), then it’s free (with attribution).
I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating for someone as inexperienced as me, and (3) it allows us to get something off the ground relatively quickly.
Anyone have suggestions for what technologies to use, or if there are sample weather websites that we can look at and model after?
edit: just to clarify, I'm not talking about the tech stack for making predictions, just for the user-facing website. We have already developed an algorithm that predicts weather much more accurately than any weather website/app we've been able to find, in our local area. We are not looking outside our local area at this time.
creating a better prediction algorithm is probably not something that's going to be achievable for an inexperienced programmer and their 8-year-old.
Are there any resources you'd recommend looking at? Also, if you have any interest in sharing your algorithm I'd love to take a look.
from first principles, coming up with an all-purpose algorithm or generally-applicable model is going to be harder than making it work for a single "use case".
for weather patterns, some parts of the country (speaking of the US here since that's where I'm familiar with) have fairly predictable cold front movements from west to east. others have ocean interactions, lake effects, etc.
I say 'washing machine' as it is a swirling mass of unpredictability. Yes there are obvious patterns that follow the seasons, but forecasts are required to be much more accurate than predicting the weather by patterns of the season.
They need to be accurate to each day, predicting temp, rainfall, wind etc. etc. The only way to do that is to try and predict how this chaotic system will progress over a period of time. Thats why all these weather agency talk about their new 'supercomputers' able to create more accurate forecasts. The processing power required to build these models is enormous.
No matter if you are forecasting locally or across the multiple states or countries, it still depends on forecasting the outcome of this chaotic system.
Like, for my purposes, I'd simply like to know the temperature trend for the next 3-5 days. Will each day's high be hotter or cooler than the previous?
Bonus points: what's the high temperature for the next 3 days (within say, 3°F).
Anecdotally, using these standards, this seems to be consistently wrong where I live for much of the summer. I don't pay attention in the other seasons as the weather is much milder.
You could also let the user choose which model to use or show a comparison.
I'm doing something related and my next step is compare models vs current weather to see which I model is more accurate.
As models change and sometimes depend on current conditions this is something that you should never stop doing (comparing which model is better)
Doesn't feel as accurate as the Met Office's app, but not too bad (tends to over predict chance of rain).
Apple’s forecast does vary slightly from the ones the BBC (using MeteoGroup) and the Met Office give, so I’m not sure what their source is if it’s not the weather channel.
It has been my go-to for years now, especially as it relates to my photography hobby. I sure hope someone steps up to replace the DarkSky experience as Apple will surely cherry pick a small subset of their core pieces to implement, likely leaving the best weather geek features on the chopping block.
The Wikipedia article states that hyperlocal is used for information, which is relevant to the population of some given community. Does this always refer to a geographically defined community or has it been extended to other logical communities, as well?
I believe the term was used to mean that the weather forecast was based on your GPS position rather than the town you are in, allowing for more 'real time' forecasts like 'it is going to rain in the next 5 minutes, but this will stop in 10 minutes' (while a traditional forecast would just say '10% chance of rain at 1pm in Leeds').
The ability to get some rain and look on an app and say "it looks like this will ease off in about half an hour, so we might as well get another beer before we go to the next pub" is really useful, and on that timespan there can be different weather in different parts of town which is why a more refined forecast is required.
Saying something is "privacy first" is cheap and easy. Proving it is another and we have enough evidence to support that they are not perfect on this front.
For my money, I'll just buy a porch thermometer and look at clouds...
It's now something akin to a weather almanac, describing the general weather patterns of locations. I still find it useful, but it's a shadow of its former self.
"And with Swift concurrency, it’s easy to request weather data with just a few lines of code."
But I‘ve never used Swift so I don‘t know.
GetWeather() { results in
// Do something with the results
UpdateUI(results)
The part in the curly braces is a closure/completion handler. The GetWeather call is not blocking, so it runs on another thread and then it calls your completion code when it's done.
This looks fine in a small example, but it quickly gets gnarly when you need to pipe those results to something else, or you can also end up deep in many completion handlers.
With the new concurrency model it's just this
let results = await GetWeather ()
UpdateUI(results)
Now let's say your UpdateUI call was also non blocking:
GetWeather() { results in
UpdateUI(results) {
DoSomethingElse ()
}
Which just becomes this
let results = await GetWeather ()
await UpdateUI(results)
DoSomethingElse()
temperatureHigh, temperatureHighTime, apparentTemperatureLow, and dozens of other fields that were in DarkSky have "NONE" listed for the Apple API.
This is a problem specifically caused by the iPad's design. On desktop you just prohibit the user from making the calculator app window bigger than reasonable and that's that. But iPads require that the current app fill the entire screen, so any apps that can't are really awkward and frustrating to use - as can be seen when you run an iPhone-only app on an iPad[0]. Third-party calculator apps have the same problem, too.
Before you mention Stage Manager, I should point out that making the calculator app an iPad Pro (2021) exclusive feature would be even sillier than the current situation of not having one.
At one point this was solvable by putting a widget in the Today view, which would mean you had a properly-proportioned calculator on your homescreen. However, several iPadOS updates have broken this fix:
* iOS 14 introduced a new widget type intended to live on homescreens that does not support user interaction. In iPadOS 14, these widgets sat on top of the older interactive ones and often pushed them far off the bottom where they were basically useless.
* iPadOS 15 redesigned the homescreen to bring it to parity with iOS 14[1], at the expense of completely removing the ability to have the Today view on the homescreen. You now have to swipe to the left to get at it.
So on a current-OS iPad, the only place for a calculator app to live that is guaranteed to always be a reasonable size is the legacy widgets section of a rarely-used Minus World of a homescreen that lives to the left of your other homescreens. Everywhere else incurs various levels of silly-looking design.
[0] Only recently did we even get the ability to rotate iPhone apps contrary to the device orientation. Before that, if you used a keyboard case, iPhone apps would more or less demand you take the iPad out of the case and hold the iPad in portrait in order to use it.
[1] If I had a nickel for every iOS feature that took a year to come to the iPad, I'd have two nickels.
PCalc has been on iPad since just after iPad launched. https://www.loopinsight.com/2010/04/07/pcalc-now-available-f...
Graphing: The classic has been ported by its original author. Not free but a pleasant surprise https://swift.org/blog/graphing-calculator/
<everyone> Apple is hostile to users!
<Apple> [adds iPad calculator]
<everyone> Apple is hostile to third party developers!
> It’s easy to use WeatherKit in your apps for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9 with a platform-specific Swift API, and on any other platform with a REST API.
[edited for tone]
If the general REST API in Swift is good then WeatherKit can be integrated into Swift apps as easily as any other service. If it's not easy then improvements to the general REST API could be considered.
No idea if they are implementing those kinds of enhancements but it’s no surprise that a native SDK would be provided.
Also, how would they implement the privacy preserving black box location implementation with a REST API? There is no need for the app to ask for or receive specific location details by using this SDK.
What is your differentiation criteria between anticipating a "huge" boon versus a "regular" or "modest" boon"?
Would you like to know more? If so just shoot me an email.
Also not having to deal with web requests (client, retry logic, polling, etc)
So you can use it without having to deal with the low level detail of HTTP connections.
Client library frees you from that.
b) OpenWeatherMap limits not just by total API calls but by API calls per second.
If you're a weather app, being able to tell your users "it will start raining in 35 minutes but pass in 55 minutes" is a huge value add over "80% chance of rain in the next hour". I found it to be quite accurate down to the 5-10 minute increment when I used to live in an area with frequent summer thunderstorms.