Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece (2023)

But iOS has this now. It's the same thing. They integrated it from Dark Sky.

And just anecdotally, Dark Sky was a delight to use. Apple Maps makes it a chore to extract the same utility from their app.

Lived in the same general area (just outside a major metropolitan area) where I use DarkSky and now Apple Weather app.

DarkSky has better data vis and more reliable prediction. Apple Weather consistently over predicts snow fall amounts and many times I’ve had to use the Feedback to correct it on current conditions (e.g. raining when it says no rain or vice versa). I believe DarkSky had the same feedback feature but I never needed it this much.

Most of the time AW is fine but it’s less good to the point I’ve considered alternatives.

Apple Weather is nothing like this.

That said, I'd still bet a dollar (that to be fair, I might lose) that Apple today is less accurate, and if they're just as accurate twelve years on, that's a fail as well.

Even without any text labels, you should be able to get a feel for what the weather is and how it will change:

- Hourly plots like Dark Sky, with everything (temperature, rain, AQI, weather conditions) in a single plot.

- The change in temperature visualized with both color and space. Space is obvious (higher -> hotter); color ranges from red for hottest to blue for coldest. All the visible plots share the same color-temperature mapping. So the gradient block to the left shows both the temperature range for that day as well as how it compares to other days.

- Finally, there is a weekly overview at the top.

Huge bag of data for you to mess around with. I've started to use it to do my own weather forecasting instead of relying on forecasting services. Where I live has a radar gap(Oregon) and ridiculously varied terrain, so forecasts aren't great anyway.

I should be able to release it before the end of January.

Best, Tomas

Both give you a huge amount of layers and datasets to mess around with. Windy recently changed their radar stuff, though, so it might be a bit confusing.

Apple says they use data from the weather channel, but this varies based on country. It used to say right in the app, but it seems like they removed that in favor of this link:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105038

Windy.app is for wind based water activities. Windy.com is a data-heavy weather information site.

* Adopt a colour scheme with similarity to the old BOM?

* Some way to store longer baseline movie animations in local state so people can avoid cost in you but run the weather radar for longer?

* Tide info? Hyper specific to people who do water things. Willyweather does this really well.

I use Willyweather and Windy. I used to use a weather app written by some mob called "shifty jelly" and their git logs were .. hysterical. Drunk fairy penguins seemed to cause most of the bugs.

- Location search & display: no English version, only localized names, which is hard to reason if you don't know native language.

- Summary: a) what does precip. in % mean and how it correlates with cm? b) pressure is only displayed in hPa, while some countries prefer mmHg; c) what does ozone index mean and why is it important?

- Next 24 hours: visual indication for temp variation through the day would be easier to reason than just by looking at numbers (as discussed in TFA).

- Next 7 days: a) unnecessary precision for y-axis (e.g. 10.9°C vs. 11°C); b) band overshoot actual values (e.g. if I see 10..−10°C, I assume that would be max/min temp, but in fact it is 8..−9°C, which is impossible to tell without hovering mouse over); c) no horiz. line through 0°C; d) no horiz. lines through y-axis ticks, which makes it harder to reason about values closer to the end of the graph; e) precip. in cm tells little, especially when band is alike (0.00..0.80 cm) - peaks on graphs look like a lot, in fact they are not? g) seeing blue precip. graph subconsciously means 'rain' to me, while in fact it would be snow; f) labels for y-axis are at the same time very small, rotated 90° and also take too much horizontal space from the graph.

- Map: moving mouse over next 7 days graph causes time shown on map to change that would make sense if map's timeline would cover all 7 days, but it only covers small part of today.

- Week: a) fog icons look like they have solid white square background, which seems to be off compared to other icons; b) low/high values are hard to reason about, especially when it says 'Low … at 11am' and there is no tick labeled '11am' (10am .. 12pm) - displaying a line through coldest/warmest hours with °C value next to it would be much easier to understand.

Also: displaying air quality prediction based on last year's AQ would be helpful.

https://repebble.com/

https://kachelmannwetter.com/ has data from dozens of models, but only in separate maps I think.