Show HN: High School Student's First App – NWS Weather Report | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: High School Student's First App – NWS Weather Report

weatherreportnow.com

62 pointsOrcazephyr28 comments

I really like the effort they put into the user manual [1]

[1] https://weatherreportnow.com/weather-report-manual.pdf

Congrats on the launch and slick website! Not sure what has gotten everyone's undies in a knot this morning but keep up the passion for creating things. I wish I continued to build things but I feel like the older one gets the more doubt that sets in. Let's all strive to have constructive feedback and work on our passions!

Does anyone know if there's an official NWS API you can pull from? Is that what this app uses? The NWS weather.gov site is my go-to for weather (no ads, no tracking) but the UI isn't great, I'd love to build my own customized front-end for it.

I use the hourly line chart graphical display on weather.gov. I got good at reading it, and really like my weather that way.

Don't think they have an api.

There is an XML feed for the hourly forecast, essentially an API...

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=38.579&lon=-90...

The NOAA has an api here:

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

It's free to use, but they have rate limits. I was always wanting to set up something like that too, but I never got around to it.

Nice app, but uninstalled immediately due to obtrusive advertisements.

Idea for any weather app: integration with driving directions via Google Maps API or OSM. Going on long trips without this is super dangerous on a motorcycle but all drivers could benefit. It's easy to optimize for minimizing dollars or time spent, but optimizing for minimizing chances of death due to weather is lacking.

Can you change the png to a jpg in the home page? it takes a long time for me to load it on a slow connection

Running the image through oxipng reduced it from 1.5MB to 1MB.

It's still big, but I like to do that as a standard practice when I put PNGs on my websites. It's a free win.

WebP format is an even bigger savings. It tends to get the typical PNG down to around 50% of it's original size in lossless mode.

I've been seeing more and more people using AVIF now.

for a second i grokked "NWS" as "Not Work Safe", and thought of that website from a long time ago that was like thef-ingweather.com , which gave you a very salty forecast

[flagged]

Good software that you use every day isn’t worth less than a cup of coffee for you? That’s fine, don’t buy it. Good UIs take time and skill to build. Should this student just do this for free? iOS users have money for software they use — $2/mo is perfectly reasonable.

I'm not against software subscriptions, but $2/mo is pretty expensive for an alternative to an app that already comes on your phone.

A $2/mo subscription is extremely expensive for something that you're going to keep using; the present value is somewhere in the $500-800 range. That's over 20x more expensive than the $25 lifetime purchase, and 3-5x the cost of a lifetime purchase of Microsoft Office Home. You would basically pay for the lifetime license after 1 year.

$25 for lifetime is maybe a little expensive for what it is, but whatever. But it seems to me that people have a similar if not worse blind spot with subscriptions as they do with credit card debt. The pricing for subscriptions is always off the charts when you compare present value to the cost of a one-time purchase.

Most devs nowadays don’t even offer you that option, so kudos for that alone

If you want to see the free data, bookmark https://www.weather.gov/. If that works out for you, fantastic. If you want that data presented in a mobile friendly, quick glanceable way with added device specific creature comforts like widgets, notifications etc. it's $2 a month.

I fail to see the rip-off here.

It's a bit obtuse to recommend weather.gov when https://merrysky.net/ exists.

How NWS are we talking? Unpixellated penetration?

Dude, the developer is a highschooler, calm down. There is also a free version.

This comment breaks the site guidelines and especially the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Please don't do that.

This is especially important when kids or students are presenting their work. The last thing they need is to run into a bunch of internet jerks—and it's not who we want this community to be, either.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the rules more to heart, we'd be grateful. You've unfortunately been breaking them in other places too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285885).

I know the reason why the NWS website is so crummy is because they deliberately don’t want to compete with commercial sites. But I have really wanted an app that presents the same data. The NWS website is mobile unfriendly. Thanks for sharing!

NWSNOW, free, no ads, no user tracking, uses NWS and NOAA API...

https://nwsnow.net/

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It’s 4 years old.

NOAA needs to get their act together. No reason USA shouldn’t have the best forecasts in the world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1gdtz0p/the...

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