Requiem for an Interface

I remember being upset about this and quite a few people saying some variation of “just use weather.app…it’s the same data.

But it’s always been about the interface and the way you display that data. I mean heck, the weather channel uses publicly available government weather data, slaps some graphics on it and then called it a whole channel.

I still miss dark sky.

I tried using Apple Weather for months—I really wanted to like it. There's just too many different charts going different directions and it adds a bunch of cognitive overhead to understand the weather.

* Current conditions take up almost half the screen—That's fine when rain is forecasted, but otherwise I don't need the biggest thing to be a number and the current conditions.

* Then the next thing down are hourly temperatures and conditions. Those are tiny and scroll horizontally.

* Then there is the 10-day barbell, which is displayed vertically. When I select an individual day, I get a pair of area charts in an action sheet showing temp and precipitation.

Dark Sky devoted the most space to the next hour. Below that had a barbell-like chart showing hourly temperatures and conditions. Then they had the 10-day barbell, but you could expand those 10-day barbells and get and hourly view within it.

That probably sounds super-picky—and maybe it is. I'm a designer. But I've moved to Carrot Weather's Dark Sky theme and have been happy with it.

Reminder that https://merrysky.net/ still captures some of DarkSky's UI innovations.

It really makes me sad that Apple decided to kill off this app. Apple Weather may have much of the same functionality, but its interface is not nearly as well thought out.

For now, the app stay on my phone, in my "App Graveyard" next to Apollo. :(

Really one of the all-time great examples of UI design

iOS 17's Weather app at least brings back the forecast's "Chance of Precipitation" graph which was conspicuously absent in iOS 16.

Talk about missing the point with their redesigned Weather app that was billed a successor for Dark Sky.