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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

There's a chance that the audience here hasn't yet seen http://forecast.io or the Dark Sky app.

This is a shame. They are radically better weather experiences than any you've seen before. Go check them out now.

They are radically better at very-short-term forecasting: I use forecast.io frequently for knowing when to take the dog for a walk etc.

I don't find them an improvement for medium-term or longer-term forecasting, and I continue to use other sources for these cases.

Good luck Dark Sky, keep improving :)

Very much so. I would use it to time to the minute when to leave on my motorcycle to avoid rain, but it's less accurate a couple days out. But it seems it usually fails pessimistic, which is just what I want to be prepared. (And frankly, with a name like Dark Sky, it's just what I would expect!)

I thought it was well-known that consumer weather forecasting is almost always pessimistic.

Forecasting sun when it rains generates complaints; the other way around, not so much.

Personally, I prefer it when they give percentages (which I assume are still pessimistic). The Met Office appears to forecast "rain" on a "30%" chance of precipitation.

Consider me one of the 10k learning that today :) It certainly makes sense to do so, but I had doubted it simply because of the many times people would argue with me about how "it wouldn't be that bad/cold/rainy". I assumed one should plan for the worst, but many liked to be reminded of bright days ahead.

YMMV and different strokes and all that.

For long-term (at least, how they did last month) is not in the top 5 (for 3 locations I checked, at least).

No problem with that; nice interface. This site compares various "weather providers" and compares how they did: http://forecastadvisor.com/

"Past Performance is Not Necessarily Indicative of Future Results"

I find SkyMotion's 2 hour precipitation forecast to be superior for the purpose of determining whether I should go out for an walk right now or not.

http://skymotion.com/

Can you qualify in what ways they're better? A brief look at them showed they have a nice rain animation but little indication of snow-line; multiple forecast graphs, which strikes me as unhelpful; and somewhat friendly phrasing of written forecast information, but nothing radically better than I've seen on, say, wunderground. They don't seem to particularly care about temperature - in particular they draw no particular attention to freezing temperatures. In terms of data presentation, there's nothing as original here as the 'storm distance' timelines on weatherspark, or the snow depth and wind speed probability density graphs you get from weather.gov.

The use case here is "Hey, I'm going to go outside in a few minutes, but it looks like rain out there: do I need to worry about rain? Should I rush?" (Alternatively, if it's already raining: will it let up any time soon?)

Longer-term forecasts and temperatures are incidental.

I use Forecast.io with these customizations I wrote that make the information I care about easier to see:

My user style https://userstyles.org/styles/104812/forecast-io-hide-map hides the map, which looks cool but is totally useless. That brings the detailed daily forecasts above the fold.

My user script https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/4699-forecast-io-auto-show... expands the detailed forecast for today when you visit the website, without you having to click it. I use the detailed forecast often, to check if the weather would be significantly different if I delayed my outing.

and their API too! https://developer.forecast.io/

A couple of immediate findings visiting forecast.io on my phone just now:

1. It defaults to my ISP's location 400 miles away in London, which is understandable but doesn't give me an obvious way to correct it. Can't select my city shown on the map or enter coordinates.

2. Despite guessing that I am in the UK it defaults its temperatures to Fahrenheit, which is utterly alien to Europeans.

10 mins later: still stuck on London.

There's a big blue bar at the top of the screen which contains an input field you can use to search for a different location. It starts out saying "Current Location", but you can adjust it. There's also a units switcher in the top right of the page.

Disclaimer: I visited forecast.io on my phone for the first time in years to check this. I may have missed subtleties of it not working.

"Continuing down that road would lead to unimaginable stress, burn-out, probable heart disease, and a slow and steady descent into functional alcoholism. That’s not where we want to go."

I'm sold. Downloading now.

Thanks, actually just purchased the app after reading the blog post, but before reading the comments. Looks like a great product, thanks to the devs.

I'm impressed that it also gives results for Europe. But how do I switch to metric units?

There's a toggle on the top right, in the blue bar.

And on the phone webapp version, at the bottom of the left menu drawer.

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