The real gut wrencher is the darksky website going down. It’s how I check weather most of the time a no other browser weather site comes close to it in simplicity and features.
[1] https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.71234500000...
[2] https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?w0=t&w3u=1&w5=pop&...
[1] https://aviationweather.gov/radar/plot?region=alb
(feel free to change, in the top left, Type = Comp Ref, and to Loop)
I’m using it for a side project (https://ppg.report/41.876,-87.624)
Overall pretty lacking in usability compared to dark sky.
1. Hyperlocal data which made it _very_ accurate in a lot of cases. Not flawless, but better than others.
2. Simple and fast. Sure, the UI wasn't fancy - but it loaded quickly. No bloat.
3. They had a really lovely API that was simple to use.
That is enough, and I personally wouldn't have noticed. Thanks for the clue.
Not necessarily a simplest solution for weather forecast, but provides wealth of information to satisfy my meteorological curiosity as well. (I pay Premium for higher precision data, and I think it worth every penny IMHO.)
Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=joshuatee.wx
F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/joshuatee.wx/
Source: https://gitlab.com/joshua.tee/wx
For fellow Canadians who used it similarly, the Canadian Gov't has a pretty handy hourly forecast[0].
The radar is also nice [1].
[0] https://www.weather.gc.ca/forecast/hourly/qc-147_metric_e.ht...
[1] https://www.weather.gc.ca/map_e.html?layers=radar&zoom=-1&ce...
I wish there was an API or non-scraping approach to retrieve the daily & hourly forecasts. With the popularity of open data policies on tax-funded public data... it seems there should be.
For example this should be the Vancouver forecast - https://dd.weather.gc.ca/citypage_weather/xml/BC/s0000141_e....
I think this is the hourly data - though in a slightly odd format - https://dd.weather.gc.ca/nowcasting/matrices/
Edit: Aha found the nowcast docs - https://eccc-msc.github.io/open-data/msc-data/nwp_nowcasting...
I’m very disappointed that Dark Sky is going away. If Apple added in the ability to see forecasted hour by hour wind speed/humidity/dew point/etc, it’d be a decent replacement.
In iOS 16 (and in macOS Ventura, which adds the Weather app), you can view hourly temperature, UV index, wind speed, precipitation, feels like, humidity, visibility, and pressure, on a graph. You can also tap and hold to view individual hourly data. You should see if the updated experience works for you!
Now we just need a lightening tracker in iOS weather…
>Weather apps are secretly selling your location data to the highest bidder
https://thenextweb.com/news/weather-apps-are-secretly-sellin...
https://mobile.twitter.com/darkskyapp/status/108135144619558...
So, not the case with Dark Sky.
They sold the whole company. If they had sold to a data hoarder like Google or Facebook, I have very little doubt that the data would have been included.
Who in their right mind thinks Google wanted to buy Fitbit for anything but their data?
>"The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out."
"Some people (including even Googlers) don’t know that there is a global switch and a per-device switch."
"Indeed we aren’t very good at explaining this to users. Add me to the list of Googlers who didn’t understand how this worked and was surprised when I read the article ... we shipped a UI that confuses users."
"I agree with the article. Location off should mean location off, not except for this case or that case."
"Speaking as a user, WTF?" another employee said, in additional documentation obtained by the Arizona Mirror. "More specifically I *thought* I had location tracking turned off on my phone. So our messaging around this is enough to confuse a privacy focused (Google software engineer). That’s not good."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/unredacted-suit-...
However, the engineers at Google aren't in charge.
Sorry, but I still remember Google pinky swearing before Congress that it would never combine the data it had on it's users with the advertising profiles it acquired with DoubleClick.
>In today's Big Tech antitrust hearing in front of a Congressional subcommittee, representative Val Demings questioned Google CEO Sundar Pichai about the company's merger with DoubleClick.
Specifically, the way Google combined data from the advertising company -- bought in 2007 -- with Google's own data. Founder Sergey Brin had told Congress it would not combine the personal information, but the company quietly did so in 2016 anyway.
https://www.engadget.com/google-antitrust-hearing-doubleclic...
>Google’s privacy policies as of March 1, 2012 established that no combination between DoubleClick’s advertising data and Google’s personally-identifiable information would take place without the prior consent of its users, but an updated version of those policies subtly allowed the integration of both databases regardless of prior consent of its users
https://www.promarket.org/2020/08/21/why-we-should-be-carefu...
People suggest that Google is a boogeyman because they have repeatedly broken their promises.
Better grab a top level business executive, who tracks company sources of income. Why engineer? He is far from money flows.
- https://www.meteoblue.com - check out the multi model, the multi model ensemble , the meteograms and the weather maps! Sadly the app itself is not as good as the website.
- https://yr.no - One of the few "free" providers with ECMWF model data (Norway has open data, that's why the data is free)
- https://www.windy.com/ - ECMWF, GFS and ICON. I don't like their presentation, but the available data is quite nice.
If you want a DarkSky replacement API, then checkout out https://pirateweather.net/ (GFS only, sadly :/ )
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi/...
Honestly, Dark Sky had been my habitual weather app until Apple killed it, but it doesn't seem as accurate as I expected. I don't know if this means I've been in places where their data is less optimized, or if I'm just noticing it more now that I have to look at other options.
For radar, I just use GR Level 3. I was tired of the slowness of the web. I add shapefiles for mPING, lightning, NWS watches, NWS convective outlooks / mesoscale discussions, etc. Great piece of software, and lots of shapefiles available on the Internet to extend it.
For forecasting, I use the College of DuPage forecast tools: https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/. There is a learning curve, but the "simulated reflectivity" is a prediction of where it's going to rain. It predicts what a radar mosaic would look like at the forecast time. I like HRRR for "today" and NAMNST for "tomorrow". GFS is also a classic for longer-term predictions, but I don't have a good enough memory to tell you how accurate it is. (HRRR is some good tech, though. Predicting the future is tough, HRRR does a pretty good job.) These models also have decent surface predictions; temperature, dewpoint, winds, etc. If you're willing to step through some pretty pictures in a very nice web interface, you can get some great ideas of what the weather is going to do. Well worth a visit.
On NAM and some other models, you can also long-press on a point to see a forecast sounding. This is probably in the realm of too much information for the average person interested in weather (and using models to make your own forecast probably is too), but hey, they have some neat software and you should play with it.
Finally, I like the SPC's site for situational awareness of thunderstorms in the summer: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/. Their forecast tools are also excellent: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/. Specifically, the mesoanalysis graphics can be interesting for anticipating exceptional events.
Anyway, I used to be a heavy user of Weather Underground. They got bought, then their parent company got bought, and now they have no actual weather information and just clickbait videos. It's very sad, but you can cobble together some tools that are freely available on the Internet and be aware of the current and upcoming weather, without being served a single ad!
Otherwise, iOS has a thing you can turn on that notifies you when it thinks it's going to start raining.
Thats what I used wunderground and dark sky for
can finally uninstall wunderground for good, thanks!