What's so special with minimalweather.com? | Hacker News Reader

What's so special with minimalweather.com?

minimalweather.com

103 pointselcuervo62 comments

So the icon shows what the weather was the previous time you ran it?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding it but it seems like an anti-feature to me.

Every time you enter the app the icon reflects the weather. The idea behind the site itself it's to show how to 'hack' the icon to reflect stuff.

It's not really hacking the icon, even in inverted commas - it's simply using the feature that allows you to specify the icon.

The thing is that Apple has not so far allowed really and truly dynamic icons on the home screen. This bothers some of us, since we'd like to have some notifications or displays visible from that screen. This is neat because it allows that, although in a limited way.

Yes. I already have a weather icon on my iPhone that doesn't show the actual weather until I open it. Right now it tells me it's 73 and sunny!

yeah, that annoys me. The calendar shows the current date! Why doesn't the weather icon show real weather? Or at least, not fake weather.

One possible reason is that the calendar date can be computed locally, the weather would require a data pull which needs to be scheduled, cached, battery managed, etc...

There's an app that'll show you the temperature in realtime on the icon without the need to open the app. It's called eWeather HD and uses the notifications feature of iOS in a pretty clever way. The app itself is a little obtuse, but having the temperature right there has made it worthwhile to me.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eweather-hd-weather-forecast/...

I've just realized how impossible it would be for me to live without widgets on the home screen. I've been taking them for granted it seems.

My understanding of it is that they're working within the constraints of WebKit in iOS. Developers aren't able to update the icon in realtime, but if you have a homescreen webapp it can update the icon each time you launch it. This is a nice workaround, since I used to launch my homescreen weather app every ten minutes, and chances are the temperature hasn't changed much since the last time I checked. I say "used to" because I use the Weather widget in Notification Center.

Is there something I am missing? Why would you be checking the weather so often? I agree that this is a novel use of a site icon, but it has limited (minimal) advantages.

For me apps like this can fall into habitual use, almost approaching muscle memory, e.g. checking e-mail/Twitter.

I think the value here isn't really displaying weather. I believe the author effectively demonstrates an interesting technique that non-native apps can utilize to make them feel more native.

As far as awesome and simple non-native weather apps go, check out: http://pattern.dk/sun/

Really beautiful.

Suggestion: Add city name. I know you don't want to clutter the interface, thus the name minimalist weather, but it makes me nervous to look at a screen and hope it has determined my location accurately. It makes me skeptical about the results too, as I didn't get any notifications on OS X Lion saying "minimalistweather.com wants to use your location". Also it displayed a gorgeous "25 degrees", while OS X's weather widget says "29 degrees"...

Thank you for you feedback. I'll add that feature along with other ones. Show and correct city and change from C to F.

Thanks. But make ˚C -> ˚F an option! Many of us don't have the faintest idea what 100˚F is (I must multiply it with 5, divide it by 9 and subtract 32 or 23 from it... too much work)!

(as a side note: for the benefit of others, ˚ is typed with option-k. I had to try a million different combination until I found it).

Weather Live has been doing this for quite some time; I wouldn't call this "so special".

It's not an enviable feature. Right now I am in San Jose and I can see what the temperature was in Boston last time I launched the app.

They took a simple feature and hacked it to its limits, I'd say that's pretty cool.

Cute hack, remindining me of "Defender of the Favicon": http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

Which is a JS version of Defender that displays wherever your browser displays the sites favorite icon.

Very nice as a hack. I am not sure about the usability of it, and a lot of the comments already capture that. If you really wanted to hack this, how about the following: 1. You package it as an app (not that hard to do, from where you'll be starting) 2. You let people set parameters for how often they want to be notified, for which city and in which scale 3. You use the push notification feature to push them the notifications as per their settings.

But all that's just trying to create the better weather app/notifier. And there's tons of ways to do that.

What you've done is really cool with the icon becoming the widget, and for that, it is a great idea. Makes me think what else you could be using this hack for - not just weather. Imagine sponsorship space - share icon space with main advertiser for a content app. Or display your high score in a game. Or show the last badge you earned in a gamified app....the possibilities are endless. Very cool hack!

the live tiles on my windows 7 phone does this actually for several apps (shows up to date info), including my weather app.

Is there a weather app that shows me the weather right now relative to the weather at the same time yesterday?

I don't know about you guys but I always evaluate weather in relative terms("it's cooler than yesterday morning") and yet most apps just throw the temperature at you...which could be wildly deceiving depending on wind etc.

It's not an app (or at least, it isn't a standalone feature of an app), but if you search on wolfram alpha, it usually provides a handy graph for the past. I'm always wondering the same thing as well.

eg http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weather+san+francisco

and hit "more" when the "Weather history & forecast" section shows up. I don't know how permanent this URL is, but here's the result I get from that:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/pod.jsp?id=MSP32441a2b0ia1...

I would love to see a better interface on that data as a standalone app.

I've tried a lot of weather apps, and my favorite, by far, is eWeatherHD. It does just what you're asking - with a last 24 hour trace of temp and barometric pressure. It will also show you the next 12 hours of temp, what temp it feels like, chance precip, UV index, and other things.

Not affiliated in any way, but really appreciate all the details in this app, and was annoyed at all the app purchases I'd made that only showed a portion of what I wanted to know.

I also like the sunrise/set, moonrise/set, moon phase info. I only miss tide info, but am not at the beach that often anyway.

If you use iPhone/iPad, Thermo (http://thermo.me) does exactly that for temperature. Temperature right now and temperature 24 hours ago.

Pretty clever to generate the image for the app icon.

I did a similar thing where I converted a screenshot of a bus schedule to a data URI and saved it to my homescreen. I did it so I could check the bus schedule in places without service.

If you're using Chrome, the Currently extension is a must:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojhmphdkpgbibohbnp...

When you open a new tab, it'll show you current time and weather forecast:

http://f.cl.ly/items/1X373t2P143f0j1I3a3R/Screen%20Shot%2020...

Nice typography, choose from 3 color schemes and whatnot.

I prefer More Interestingness* - I have a clock on my machine already, and I rarely need to know the weather every time I load a new tab.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ngddmdmkjnnefgggjn...

That link goes to Currently still. Here's More Interestingness: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ngddmdmkjnnefgggjn...

Oops - thanks!

I don't get it. My Android has a widget on my homepage that shows me the current weather for my location, updated live. Is that all this is doing?

No, in fact this particular implementation will only update the icon AFTER you load the page (from what I can gather anyway). Not sure why that is valuable.

It may also be pertinent to note that there are no widgets for iOS, so something as basic as live weather becomes a bit of a chore.

Yes but less. You see iOS does not have desktop widgets like android/windows, so this is a creative way to show the updates within the app icon.

There's a live weather widget in the notification center for iPhone. Shame it's only for weather and stocks, and developers can't use it.

We can of course hope it would change in iOS 7... Along with a better inter-app communication system.

If you look at the screenshot of the home screen, you'll notice that this is not an Android device and thus has no Android widgets. So, no, that's not "all this is doing".

"But my Android can do it, why can't the iPhone, another reason why Apple sucks!" :rollseyes

Well, I did mean it as an actual question. I didn't know Apple didn't have widgets (or something similar)

If iOS had widgets, don't you think that people wouldn't resort to the half-working hack described in the linked article?

Hence my confusion.

Very cool that you got this to work in iOS, but you know what else is special? Android widgets.

I never understood the point of a service that tells you the weather where you are.

So you know what to expect when you walk outside.

And yet, it seems so magical.

That being said, I have my curtains drawn always, so I use it.

Having to open the app to update the weather rather defeats its utility.

For some reason I'm really bothered by the fact that it's locked to Fahrenheit if you're in the US. At least give me a query parameter or something.

That's fair. I didn't figured out a way to keep a clean UI and switch unit. Will add a query param and think something for the interface. Thank you for the feedback.

On the other side of that, I'm in the U.S. but I use a VPN in Sweden so I can only see it in Celsius.

It might be cool if you could click the text, "20 ºC," to switch between the two.

Nine times out of ten I want to know the weather X hours from now, not the current weather or the weather Y hours in the past.

There is an excellent widget on Android that shows the weather for the next 24 hours which does exactly this. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.veierland....

Can I specify a zip code? I went to it on my desktop and my phone, and both show different, wrong temperatures.

Seems like a decent use for iPad since we still (!?) don't have the built-in iOS app.

This will be great on my blackberry, all the other free weather apps out there suck.

Ugh... minimal doesn't have to mean useless. In my mind you could display four times as many stats about the weather and still be a far cry from the clutter-fuck that is weather.com. As it is this is useless for anybody who wants to know anything beyond "is it hot or cold right now."

Still this is enough for some people (like me) who just want to see the current temperature. There are plenty of sites/apps that do what you said so no need to tag this one as 'useless'.

minimalweather 2.0: I like to call it "window" :)

Hm? My window provides an experience rather close to reality, except the 'getting soaked by summer rain' part. I wouldn't call that 'minimal'. Maybe your window is broken. Does it run iOS, Android or WP7?

i badly want weather radar that doesn't suck

I think http://fullscreenweather.com is pretty good.

It's great!

Nothing.

The really, really, really poor man's widget. What's the point if it's showing me stale data? If it's been so long that I can't remember the temperature, I'm going to have to launch the app anyway.

I think it's more of a neat hack, not a replacement for anything.

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