A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
nightingaledvs.com
nightingaledvs.com
I live in a tiny alcove surrounded by hills and our weather can be up to 5 degrees cooler than the valley south of me.
Apple Weather just doesn't offer that precision.
The disappearance of Dark Sky is literally what Apple has been doing to the whole computer world. Enforcing their direction, because it's better, while taking away your choice.
There are certain things that shouldn't be summarized. Weather is one of them.
The Weather UI is a (failed) exercise of trying to reduce a days worth of weather in a single icon.
I currently use https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=34.1823&lon=-1...
That said, I have a hard time imagining how I could improve on the data density, clarity and depth of this 10 day forecast, customized by me, from wunderground.com
You can see clearly:
* 24hr temperature cycles
* cloud cover vs. sun
* wind speeds (with direction)
* precipitation likelihood and amounts
* barometric pressure
* overall conditions
During storm season, with 1 click I can get to the "wundermap" which gives me 45-60 mins of storm tracking display, allowing me to make my own guess on whether or not a given storm complex is going to hit us head on or not, using "local knowledge" to shape my conclusion.
Hope that helps. Oh, this is also the "10 day forecast". I never use the daily or hourly views.
[1] https://meteograms.com/ (I use the Android app)
It looks like the yr.no chart view that I've used on my phone for years. I appreciate having the pressure, precip, temp on separate but aligned charts to avoid too much density.
Weather representation is hard though. I care about different things at different times of year. In the winter: temp, freezing line, precip, wind speed/direction, and jet stream postion in 4-12 hour increments.
In the summer: temp, cloud cover, thunderstorm chance, precip on a 12 hour tto daily level. But I care about wind speed and direction on a hourly level for water activities.
In both cases I like an easy way to see the radar/satellite images and sometimes the model trends so I can see where precip or cloud cover is more or less.
I've noticed that it got progressively less accurate the closer it got of the shutdown by Apple.
The iOS weather app is pretty inaccurate and borderline useless in comparison. It will tell me it's raining when it's not and vice/versa. Time predictions are so out of whack that they might as well not be there; they also get revised all the time.
I understand that weather can be finnicky and predictions are just that. But Dark Sky did it correctly and Apple does not. I wonder what was the point of acquiring them, if their UI is inferior (although pretty!) and so are the predictions.
I'm in this thread to hopefully find an alternative, and wunderground.com looks like it might be the ticket.
> Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? It seems to me that their usual mode of operation is to completely ignore feedback, and then after a decade or so, they come back with some portion of it and act like it's a thing they completely invented.
Didn't they give two year's notice?
> Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade?
Is there an instance of them taking a decade?
Five years, for sure. See butterfly keyboards - people could hate it, it could have more widely reported failures but they can't replace it without revising the whole laptop's design (which they do every five years).
[1]: https://merrysky.net [2]: https://open-meteo.com
Geometric Weather is a fantastic app with the same look and feel. Carrot Weather also just (?) added what is effectively a "DarkSky mode". It's lovely.
One newish app that's good (though it unfortunately doesn't have a status bar weather indicator) is omWeather[1], and it uses Open-Meteo as its backend.
Weather has same information, presented a bit in a different way. Sure, I think they could have done better job.
Most important component, however, are the models they use. Weather/Dark Sky models are good, but at some moment they diverge from Wundeground - another app I use. So I started paying for Windy, which allows you to see a view with 6 (!) different models. I'm not sure why I need that, but I love having this feature.
I wonder if Carrot is using the Dark Sky API.
In the UK the DarkSky source data also appears better.
Unfortunately the MetOffce app is not good.
In contrast, one of my least favorite parts of the Apple weather app is the radar view --- in order to see where a storm is headed I need to open the map, select the 24 hour forecast, wait for all the data to load (often several seconds, if not more!), and then let the whole animation play out. What would take me less than half a second on Dark Sky ends up taking me 10-30+ seconds on Apple Weather.
>Is there anything that has the precipitation graph similar to dark sky
The precipitation graph is in the Weather app, so it's unclear why this is being included as a complaint about the Weather app?
That's not the same as putting it front-and-center. Yes, the information is there, but the interface design is garbage.
There's definitely a taste / opinion component to any deep design critique. I think for many (for whom the post resonated), the ability to quickly glance at Dark Sky and understand relevant weather contextually was THE game changer.
It's a hard thing to discuss, because until you've felt the experience, it doesn't seem like a "big deal".
Some apps do use text to talk about the current / upcoming rain, but showing it visually makes it even easier. The ease of use is important because weather apps aren't meant to be that interactive (like a game). They're meant to be context-sensitive information graphics that let you drop in and out very very quickly.
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#inferring_context_from_the_e...
Apple Weather presents this information in graphical form as well. When I open the app, not only is what I need to know — "Rainy conditions expected around 7pm" — front and center, but just below that I can scroll through hours with rain percentages, and with another tap I can get as much detail as I could want.
To find it, you need to know that the interface is interactive the same way as other interfaces like control center are - clicking a 'tile' pops/navigates to more details.
You don't have to tap on temperature - tapping on the precipitation forecast will drill down to precipitation estimates.
Just know that Apple Weather (like Dark Sky before it) uses multiple different models, so the forecasts 15 minutes, 2 hours, and 1 day out are likely to be reasoned about entirely differently.
Their radar map with all those pretty colors was super buggy, so much so that you couldn't trust it. If you move the map or zoom in, or pan around, the rain / radar data often would not move with the map. So you would have a 2x scaling issue with how large the rain area was.
Also, they never provided confidence information. They often made predictions that were wrong, and never informed you of how confident their forecasts were. But they would always show a 'flawless' representation of the data so you would be convinced it was right.
Yes yes, it was pretty. But it was not backed by science, and the data was misrepresented I'd say 100% of the time. You can't have a masterpiece of data visualization where a major component of the vis is 'looking pretty' and the factualness of it is ignored.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/dark-sky-weather-app-ap...
Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot.
Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’
You know, northern Californians.
It was a poor fit for people whose weather landscape includes frequent storms; snowfall; temperature ranges that go down below freezing (seriously - dark sky’s temperature graphs never marked freezing temperatures for some reason); multiple types of precipitation; etc.
What the UK has is changeable weather, which is, as I say, what dark sky excels at helping you with (‘will I need me brolly? Or will it blow away?’)
> Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW
I think you're actually in complete agreement with OP
With Apple Weather, you get a snow icon and a percentage for future days. For DarkSky it was an actual projected snowfall amounts, which is so much more useful. Are we expecting 2 inches? Or 20?
On a daily basis, Dark Sky had a great graph of hourly projections. Apple Weather has a bar chart with no numbers unless you hover on each bar, and it will project 8 hours of snow in the hourly view but then the bar chart only shows a bar on one hour.
When I evaluated it, my main concerns were things like ‘am I gonna have to dig the car out in the morning?’ and ‘is that thunderstorm heading right for me or just to one side?’ - and those were not things I felt Dark Sky did particularly well. The old weatherspark visualizations used to be much better, but they seem to have vanished.
Which is fine! Tools can be great for some things and not others! I just find it surprising that it is touted as having hot weather presentation ‘right’. I’m still waiting for better.
Plus, Dark Sky could have switched up their data feeds or algorithms to improve this. But it's difficult to teach their design approach
I just found it surprising that ‘rain will turn to ice starting at 7pm’ was not also a usecase Dark Sky gave as much attention to.
The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult.
I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparable.
I feel like I lost a friend that I consulted with daily.
Whoever designed it doesn't understand the concept of daily max/min temperatures, and the daily low presented in the app is the lowest during that calendar day, rather than the forecast overnight low following the day. It drives me absolutely mad, because I can never reliably determine how cold it will get overnight without going into the hourly view (and even that could be inaccurate for fast-moving weather systems).
Is the alternative you described standard?
Apple's weather app shows a low of ~40f.
In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn. That also happens to be the time of day when most of us are first leaving the house. That's a pretty important piece of information to have and it isn't there at a glance.
Probably true, and yet the counterexamples are when the temperature forecast is particularly important when I'm choosing what to wear. Any simplification of the temperature forecast into daily lows and highs will fail certain use cases, so I think it's very reasonable to make the daily lows and highs as well- and simply-defined as possible and provide an hourly forecast so that people can also check for the potential edge cases.
I don't see any defensible opinion to let the lows be during/before sunrise.
Can’t you just check Friday’s temps? I’m not sure why you’d expect this info out of Thursday.
The daily low is the lowest temp of the day. It could very well be in the future. But it’s certainly not in the next day, and it’s not from a specific hour. If you want to see tomorrow mornings temps look at tomorrow’s hourly temps.
Do you expect the daily high to work the same? So maybe at 4pm it’s down from the daily high and now it shows today’s high is actually some temp around 3pm tomorrow?
I get what you’re saying but in no way is that a daily high. More like a next 24 hour high but even then, do you want that? That means if it’s 80F at 3pm today and 90F at 3pm tomorrow and it’s 3pm, then the high will be 90.
It’s much easier to just accurately categorize these by day/hour and let the user find what they care about instead of warping definitions to anticipate certain use cases.
In the case of Apple, Cupertino is a pretty boring weather locale. Sometimes you need to zipper your coat and once in awhile it rains.
Which also explains why iPhone headphone wires get brittle in moderately cold weather, and iPhones go into thermal shutdown mode at temperatures that are common in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and the non-Bay Area parts of California.
It's also worth noting that the midnight-to-midnight scheme is a lot more well-defined than the alternative we're both advocating. What do you show as the low temperature for today if it's currently 3am and the temperature isn't going to drop until 3am tomorrow? If that temperature drop is displayed as today's low temperature, then I won't be able to discern whether it will get cold during this night (i.e. today between 1am and 7am) or the following night (i.e. between 7pm today and 7am tomorrow). Not to mention that cold systems can move in at any time, and it may be much colder at noon tomorrow than 3am tomorrow, so in many case "overnight low" isn't even what you care about.
But the broader point is that the utility of an overnight temperature is that it happens while most people are sleeping, and thus unable to respond to it.
Fluctuations while one is awake can be coped with.
IMHO, the most reasonable intuitive measures would be: overnight low, rain during the midnight-to-midnight day
Really anywhere where temperatures change frequently for reasons other than the time of day. Probably the vast majority of people who use temperature forecasts in consumer weather apps.
> But the broader point is that the utility of an overnight temperature is that it happens while most people are sleeping, and thus unable to respond to it.
> Fluctuations while one is awake can be coped with.
I couldn't disagree more. Surely the most common use case by far for quick checks of the daily forecast is simply to decide what to wear when you leave the house in the morning. If you're unhoused, or camping, or you work at night, or you're a gardener, then of course overnight temperature forecasts are also vital.
And the entire state of Colorado. It is not that uncommon for our daily high to be at 12am, or for the temperature to drop 30F between a midday high and dusk as a front moves in.
These aren't conditions you can describe with just two temperature points, no matter where they are anchored.
For overnight temperatures, many people just want badging to know if there is a frost/freeze condition - e.g., is there a weather condition they need to deal with while they would otherwise be sleeping.
> Day 58°↑ • Night 48°↓
Maybe the arrows are used to indicate the high and low?
Weather is not divided by some arbitrary time humans created. Max and min temperatures occur overwhelmingly in their respective day and night cycle. Adding some arbitrary cut off point in the middle of those cycles just makes comprehending max/min temps unnecessarily more difficult then it needs to be.
What if we set the calendar day to change at midday, would we start reporting max temps up to 12pm, past 12pm? How useful do you think that info would be?
People are interested in the overnight minimum, not a confusing minimum that could be either early morning or just before midnight depending on the weather at the time.
It really frustrates me that Apple completely killed off the product. I don't know what their problem is, but it seems to me that it would have been no problem to allow the app to continue to exist as a standalone one while supposedly "integrating" it into whatever Apple's weather app is.
Shot in the dark - Apple wants you to live and die within Apple's ecosystem, using only Apple products. Doesn't matter if they own Dark Sky, it's not "Apple Weather", and that's what they want - iThis, iThat, Apple Something, Mac Whatever. Dark Sky also didn't look or feel like the rest of Apple's products, and they want consistency and are not about to redesign the rest of their software line to fit with Dark Sky's much-loved UI/UX.
Why redo everything you've done when you can just kill off this one little thing and force everyone back over to you?
Shazam, I can only take a stab at this one. Perhaps it's a name thing? "Nobody", eg the public at large (so, set aside the passionate Dark Sky love you see in this thread), gives a shit about weather apps, at least on a broad scale. The default option is fine. You don't say, "Dark Sky it", you say, "Check the weather". When you wanna know what's playing, most people say, "Shazam it". Apple and Android integration of this into Siri/search came way later, far after "Shazam it" became the standard phrase. There's no "obvious" replacement, like there is with the default weather app.
Here are 195 reasons why Apple bought Dark Sky: https://i.imgur.com/5dkofIG.jpg
Have you noticed how many moves they've made to make it easy to give up your location privacy to Apple? Emergency SOS is the latest one, complete with lots of submarine news articles about how OMG It Saved My Life!! This paper has many many more examples: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
I look forward to your blog post where you detail your phone call to emergency services:
911: 911, what's your emergency?
You: I fell down the stairs and broke my leg. It's gushing blood everywhere!
911: What is your location?
You: Oh, no you don't! I'm not giving my location to anyone! You're just gonna have to GUESS where I am!
Only if you sign up for the Apple Developer Program, comply with all their rules and expectations, and not be surprised if they ban you from using it with no explanation whatsoever.
That must be why developing iOS Apps is so unpopular with developers…
Apple products are popular among consumers and developers in spite of their many user-hostile decisions precisely because there are few alternatives, all of which have substantial disadvantages as well.
Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
They aren't all "happy" about it, but as I mentioned in the post you replied to, there is not a decent alternative.
> Maybe their decisions are only hostile to geeks who want to run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
Certainly not but one would have to be interested in the fact of the matter to realize it.
Indeed, seems they are not "happy" to buy Apple.
> There is an alternative
I mentioned this twice, it is also notoriously inadequate and user-hostile as well. Do you have anything to add to the discussion?
Your thesis was that Apple customers were not happy to buy Apple products…
> is also notoriously inadequate and user-hostile as well
Your second thesis was there was no decent alternative.
Well, if so many people are unhappy with both iOS and Android, I’m sure they can but something like PinePhone.
Or maybe most people don’t care about running a full open source stack on the Apple Pencil?
So if Apple Weather (or whatever they call the in-house weather app) comes with the phone, then your "same thing but different" app will not be made available in the Apple app store.
Probably some of the best visualization techniques I have seen. Free features cover most use cases; premium gives you better resolution.
- A great simple one is YR: https://www.yr.no/en
- if you happen to be in Switzerland: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.admin.meteo..., https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meteoswiss/id589772015
Government sponsored apps are great because there's no advertising, they aren't selling your data, and they are free. They usually pay to collect the data, run the models, and provide the API anyway. Providing the app is the cheap part.
Otherwise
Windy.com and Meteoblue are good.
I presume you mean the $7 "For as long as the developer feels like it" Premium Version.
It has the data that's indispensable to me: precipitation amount per hour. I don't care as much about how likely it is to rain, I care about whether I'm going to get sprinkled on or drenched.
The wind and weather map is pretty nice.
"I hate them so I will only give them a tiny bit less money" is why it will never change
a) every big tech company tries to do a ton of stuff. I'm not happy with this weather app. Usually the market would reflect this by me buying a different weather app. However, Apple isn't in the weather app market, they are in the phone and computer market. If I buy a different weather app, Apple actually gets more money! Buying a different phone because Apple made the decision to kill my favorite weather app is now muddled in with so many other factors and Apple and their shareholders are unlikely to link a drop in phone sales to killing the weather app. Now I also need to look at the very few real competitors and probably have issues with them as well. It's a mess because they all do too much. Maybe I don't want Android devices because Google built Bart without disclosing training sources. What a mess!
b) someone builds something nice and it just gets killed by an incumbant. No real competition between most startups and incumbants. It's more like a buyer/seller relation
I'd love to see this all fixed in my utopia by prohibiting acquisitions and instead force companies to fight for customers. But I'm sure that would need to happen globally to avoid putting our own companies at a disadvantage where they'll just get their lunch stolen by companies that aren't limited like that. I'm also sure this solution has other side effects I cannot think of.
The Dark Sky website was brilliant as well. It loaded quickly, wasn't covered in ads, and the UX was comparable to their app.
I haven't really found anything to replace it with yet. I've defaulted to weather.gov, but the UX isn't really there yet (it's great for storms, or when you need to drill down into good data though).
I used the customize button to remove everything but temp, chance of rain and wind.
It's no Dark Sky, but it's something.
It boggles the mind, doesn't it? The equivalent of a bunch of food and housing was spent just so something useful could be taken out of half of the population's hands. Just think about that, overall social utility decreased and someone spent money to make it happen. Absolutely parasitic behavior.
Dark Sky was magical. It was the kind of experience Steve Jobs used to get giddy about on stage for 20 minutes at a time.
Man I wish they could just hit the undo button on axing it.
CARROT is OK for "a different kind of weather app", but nothing really is the same.
Dark Sky's UI was just... Nice.
To date nothing has come close to Aperture's seamless blending of image organizing, editing, and metadata enrichment. I'm not holding my breath that an app that feels like DarkSky will ever come along.
RIP
It does a really nice job of showing me most of what Dark Sky showed, in a similarly easy-to-glance-at format once I spent a little time learning to read its graphs.
I think Carrot Weather has a lot of graphs directly ripped off from Dark Sky but the constant attempts to upsell me to a subscription plan while I was playing with it really turned me off, as did the "what political alignment would you like the sweary forecast to have" switch.
> The Dark Sky API and website will continue to function until March 31st, 2023.
That said, if you're interested in terrific weather info and dataviz, I heartily recommend Windy.app.
But there is a perfectly elegant alternative: Just use the expected amount of rainfall. The epected value combines both amount and probability of rainfall in one single number, without being highly arbitrary like other approaches, such as the usual reporting of plain "probabilities" with unclear interpretation.
(Of course one could add to the expected rainfall amount also the variance, to distinguish more certain predictions from more uncertain ones, though this information might often not even be that important.)
Meanwhile the 'probability' listed in forecasts is also well defined as an expected value - it's (probability of X% rain coverage) * (X %), over all X. (Rain is defined as > .01")
Loose definition (with errors and assumptions, but helps some without getting into actual probability math):
If it says "30%" - many of us have heard "30% chance of showers". It is NOT "30% chance of showers"; it actually is "100% percent chance of rain, over 30% of the area, within a given time, of a particular amount of rain."
Which is STILL (to me), difficult for the average person to comprehend.
Copying and pasting from Weather.com (linked PDF - https://www.weather.gov/media/pah/WeatherEducation/pop.pdf)
PRECIPITATION PROBABILITY The probability of precipitation forecast is one of the most least understood elements of the weather forecast. The probability of precipitation has the following features: ..... The likelihood of occurrence of precipitation is stated as a percentage ..... A measurable amount is defined as 0.01" (one hundredth of an inch) or more (usually produces enough runoff for puddles to form) ..... The measurement is of liquid precipitation or the water equivalent of frozen precipitation ..... The probability is for a specified time period (i.e., today, this afternoon, tonight, Thursday) ..... The probability forecast is for any given point in the forecast area To summarize, the probability of precipitation is simply a statistical probability of 0.01" inch of more of precipitation at a given area in the given forecast area in the time period specified. Using a 40% probability of rain as an example, it does not mean (1) that 40% of the area will be covered by precipitation at given time in the given forecast area or (2) that you will be seeing precipitation 40% of the time in the given forecast area for the given forecast time period. Let's look at an example of what the probability does mean. If a forecast for a given county says that there is a 40% chance of rain this afternoon, then there is a 40% chance of rain at any point in the county from noon to 6 p.m. local time. This point probability of precipitation is predetermined and arrived at by the forecaster by multiplying two factors: Forecaster certainty that precipitation will form or move into the area X Areal coverage of precipitation that is expected (and then moving the decimal point two places to the left) Using this, here are two examples giving the same statistical result: (1) If the forecaster was 80% certain that rain would develop but only expected to cover 50% of the forecast area, then the forecast would read "a 40% chance of rain" for any given location. (2) If the forecaster expected a widespread area of precipitation with 100% coverage to approach, but he/she was only 40% certain that it would reach the forecast area, this would, as well, result in a "40% chance of rain" at any given location in the forecast area.
But for deciding for "getting your jacket", the expected amount of rainfall seems much more relevant. Basically, you don't need a jacket if the rainfall is very unlikely, or weak, or short. In all those cases the expected amount will be low.
My understanding is that the probabilities in weather forecasts aren't a probability at all, but rather a coverage measure. Local weather models are computed in discrete grid coordinates of say 10km. Every grid cell of 10km^2 has a single set of computed forecast data. The percentage is a measure of how much of that area received rain in the timeframe, not of probability of rain, but of coverage of rain.
I also do a lot of cycling, and total duration spent in the rain tends to matter more to me than the amount of rainfall. I don’t mind riding through a quick downpour or two on a ride if I can dry out in between, but spending several hours in constant rain can be miserable (and hypothermia becomes a concern) - even if it’s light rain.
Of course expected amount definitely has uses, too. For example if there is rain forecast for tonight, and I’m trying to determine the probability that a field will be usable for practice in the morning.
Anyway I would say that both probability and expected amount are important, and any competent weather app should offer both. The Apple Weather app only shows hourly forecasts for expected amount, and that alone would be enough to be a dealbreaker for me.
The Apple app has been even worse than Dark Sky was at this.
Instead of an app, I just have a bookmark on my home screen.
Too bad they don't show it on mobile though!
Does anyone have a recommendation for something similar? The usability of the WU app is pretty awful.
And if Apple bought that code, did they use it themselves? Is Apple doing anything to improve weather forecast accuracy in the main weather models by running data assimilation on cleaned barometer data?
If not it is such a wasted opportunity that I just get so angry about. If so....please tell us more.
Especially since you don't actually _need_ raw pressure data to be useful. Pressure rate of change over time is still useful and produces improved accuracy in some local forecasts.
But not only that, the researchers at UW under Cliff Mass found that you can do on-device ML to clean the quality of the data, remove errors, and live-adjust to MSLP on-device, without even needing the dense network of sensors nearby for error correction.
It's 100% doable, but it just takes some hard science and effort.
> That makes it extremely noisy for detecting slow moving metrics like the weather
Yes, but, the noise problem was solved half a decade ago.
A 10cm change in elevation at sea level results in a 0.0001% change in atmospheric pressure [0]. On the other hand, weather-relevant pressure changes operate on scales of ~0.1% [1]. By my math, a small weather-relevant pressure change would be equivalent of someone changing their elevation by 100 meters.
Additionally, on a modern phone the barometric data can be adjusted against the accelerometer and GPS to mitigate changes in elevation (especially relative to, as you say, a slow-moving measurement).
[0] https://www.mide.com/air-pressure-at-altitude-calculator [1] https://barometricpressure.app/content/understanding-high-lo...
It isn't the GPS or position of the device you need to correlate, its trustworthy data. Is the device on an elevator, or did the pressure actually drop?
The best weather app I've ever used.
Much thanks to the founder Duane & his partner for the ongoing development
> Page not found (404) > Request Method: GET > Request URL: http://flowx.io/privacy/ > Raised by: wagtail.core.views.serve
> You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.
They tout excellent app UX but the website has a lot of rough edges visually.
Again, not discounting their work. I'm still going to install and try out, but initial impressions matter.
I believe they are still a team of one, and have focused on app progress and efficiency at the expense of bugs & loose ends that would typically be handled in a larger organization with dedicated teams for that sort of thing. I bet they would
Personally I find it charming. That is until I run into a security issue.
I can't speak for Flowx though.
So do I spend hours looking for a fix, look into replacing it with a static pages site (I'm thinking Hugo) or just go back to porting Flowx to Apple :-)
- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/settings/#debug
Setting DEBUG = False doesn't cause in Internal Server Issue. The issue is caused by something else, having DEBUG = True just means Django will return a detailed error page, instead of a generic 500 error page.
IIRC, DEBUG = True also used to leak memory, which doesn't matter so much for local development, where it's intended to be used.
I want to try static page generators (Hugo) instead since they are easier to maintain. So it's a prioritization question - do I spend time fixing this bug or spend the time on migrating.
imho, static pages site is the best way to simplify. My personal favorite is hexo.io, but ultimately pick anything that gets the job done.
I'm not a fan of website - they have become complex. I'm currently looking into static pages as a replacement.
That said, Flowx has many moving parts: app development, data servers, data processing, support, forum, website, and others. My main focus is app development and probably the least focus is the website.
Everyone talks about UI, but you can have the most amazing UI in the world and it would be useless if it was presenting you with bad data.
Its just stacked graphs of temperature, humidity, wind, and precipitations for 2 days. Shows sunrise/sunset. Its so not pretty, but quite effective.
It took a few days, but I got quite good at reading the weather from these graphs at a glance.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3761&lon=-7...
While this is true on the multi-day range for sure, what really made Dark Sky magical was its to-the-minute prediction of rain.
If Dark Sky said "rain in 22 minutes", you had 18-26 minutes to walk a dog before getting wet.
No other weather app has ever come close to that.
Specifically, I don't understand this: "all temperature ranges are rescaled to take up the same amount of space in the app.", since it seems like both the Dark Sky and Weather.app views use pills that don't cover the x axis, as expected.
I think this image does the best job of showcasing the difference: https://i0.wp.com/nightingaledvs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...
In Apple Watch, the min and max values (the numeric values left / right of the pills) are all aligned vertically on top of each other. In Dark Sky, they aren't aligned because the horizontal position is driven by the min and max values themselves. This is subtle but CRUCIAL for information graphics / software, where "glance-ability" is so so important.
In both screenshots of that image, the horizontal position of the pills are driven by the temperature. I don't see the difference other than where the min/max label is placed.
Has anyone else found this feature elsewhere?
It doesn’t seem like the weather data was unique - what was unique was its user focussed design.
To acquire it just to shut it down would have only made sense to me had they actually folded the design of dark sky into their weather app and put their founders in charge of the app. Doesn’t seem like that happened
I use Android and never used the nice app, but used the predictions in other apps. Knowing when it was going to rain was really handy. Apps now their own predictions but not as good.
Unfortunately the new apple weather version seems to have inherited exactly the same map flaws.
I keep Storm on an iPhone and look at it every so often, even though it no longer retrieves weather data.
It’s like they got a 7 day forecast, and never updated it.
Something must have happened this year, because it used to be very accurate.
Now, if if you want accurate weather (down under) you need to use the pretty good BOM app. But, it doesn’t have a Home Screen widget, or watch complications.
In fact it seems that they inspired heavily from Dark Sky's UI as well. In my opinion iOS now has a very clever and polished Weather app that contains many of the features mentioned in the article.
Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/GYP3ym8
I did prefer the design of Dark Sky, since the data was larger and more visually separate from the background, allowing it to be more readable at a glance. But I found that after the big update they had essentially the same functionality and the same UI.
It might be functionally the same e.g. It only shows conditions for the next 5 hours - not all day - how can you tell if you need a raincopat if you go ot. I am on an iPhone in portrait mode. DarkSky showed this as a column of data Weather as a row. This is fundamental to the whole UI.
If you compare the # of clicks it takes and the amount of time it takes to interpret information for the same task for Dark Sky vs the Apple Weather app, it becomes clear that the Apple Weather app "isn't quite there yet". But I hope it will be soon!
If your needs are straightforward, then the Weather app is a pretty good replacement.
Apple has well & truly forsaken us.
Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972839 - Feb 2023 (71 comments)
Apple blundered when it killed off Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34663534 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)
Apple finally killed off the beloved Dark Sky weather app today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34207668 - Jan 2023 (7 comments)
Apple Shutting Down Popular Weather App 'Dark Sky' Tomorrow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198207 - Dec 2022 (62 comments)
DarkSky: The World’s Best Terrible Weather App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34178827 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191 - Dec 2022 (15 comments)
Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34142868 - Dec 2022 (24 comments)
Dark Sky Removed from iOS App Store Ahead of Upcoming Shutdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893850 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
Ask HN: Dark Sky EOL, Which weather app do you like? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33153663 - Oct 2022 (5 comments)
Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32817555 - Sept 2022 (301 comments)
Dark Sky EOL: 1/1/2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32816725 - Sept 2022 (2 comments)
In wake of Apple acquisition, Dark Sky ends Android support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049906 - Aug 2020 (21 comments)
Ask HN: Best Dark Sky Replacement for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24030412 - Aug 2020 (5 comments)
Ask HN: Dark Sky is gone. How can it be rebuild sustainably? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24023151 - Aug 2020 (5 comments)
Dark Sky Joins Apple - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753192 - April 2020 (2 comments)
Apple acquires Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739839 - March 2020 (576 comments)
Dark Sky App is finally available on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684938 - May 2016 (1 comment)
Dark Sky has a new owner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8875478 - Jan 2015 (55 comments)
Forecast – Worldwide Weather Forecasts From the Makers of Dark Sky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5446134 - March 2013 (45 comments)
Dark Sky Version 2.0 (with sales figures) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4382638 - Aug 2012 (1 comment)
We just launched an API for down-to-the-minute rain predictions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009349 - May 2012 (1 comment)
Dark Sky - Weather Prediction, Reinvented - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186978 - Nov 2011 (79 comments)
Show HN: Dark Sky, reinvented Weather Prediction and Radar Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3163426 - Oct 2011 (2 comments)
So, yeh, Dark Sky was beautiful but I'm not sure (for me anyway) a weather app is the necessity that many people claim it is.
Do you not ever go outside? I can't imagine not caring about the forecast, I make decisions based on it every single day.
Obviously I can imagine living without a weather app, but I genuinely can't imagine having one but not finding it useful. One of the things people loved about Dark Sky was not just knowing whether it is or isn't going to rain, but that it's going to rain in precisely 35 minutes, I have time to bike to the store instead of driving. I used this a lot and it was very accurate.
Don't get me wrong, I did love DS and the accuracy was insane - it's just that my wife pointed out that I probably don't actually need to know this stuff. As she would say - "does it really matter?" - I mean, if I get wet, so what? I think over time I've come to agree with her :-)
But - am I affected by the weather? Nope.
In those latter markets, something that tells you it’s about to rain is super useful.