It renders the information totally different. How can it be a clone?

Inspired by MerrySky: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

Some differences:

- Shows weather from yesterday for comparison

- All hourly plot trackers connected; not just the top one

- Includes AQI

- Sky color visualization (try scrubbing across dawn/dusk!)

- Non-precipitation colors approximate sky color (haziness)

- Temperature variation visualized both spatially and with colors

- Data source is Open Meteo

- Planned: 60 minutely forecast like https://openweathermap.org

Thanks for the mention! I'm the author of merrysky. Opened to feedback. What would you say you miss the most?

And a toast to its source, the drop-in PirateWeather API: https://pirateweather.net/

Thx bro. I stumbled into this thread thinking it was about something else, and left with a new favorite weather bookmark.

Nice things:

  - Loads fast
  - Nice vis of both today and week
  - Can mouse over the visualizations to get precise readouts.

Great rec! Thanks! See also Windy.app (a paid app w/ great dataviz, dx, and robust set of data sources).

> Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate

Is it not? The rainfall-per-minute over the next hour on iOS seems about the same accuracy as Dark Sky had -- I used Dark Sky for years. It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough, same as iOS did after. You can even scrub the precipitation map predictions and they look the same to me.

I know the Dark Sky prediction accuracy was greatly dependent on where you lived -- this is something that was widely discussed back in the day. If you've seen a drop in accuracy, did you simply move?

Yes! The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical, right out of Back to the Future 2. I used this countless times.

So much of weather forecasting, at that time, was about trends and probabilities. DarkSky was about events, certainty, and action.

It was truly ahead of anything else and forced a new standard.

I've never understood why Apple didn't adapt Dark Sky's design lessons. Apple Weather is functional, but dull.

Agreed, that’s what won me over to Dark Sky. Now I use Carrot Weather and like that a lot, the “it’s going to rain hard in XX minutes” notifications are awesome, especially with a dog. I’ve gotten that notification close to a normal time I’d take the dog out and been able to run him outside before it pours rain for the next hour.

Kind of feel like watching Spiderman tonight and I don't know why hehe.

In all seriousness I heard some good things of dark sky. My current weather app is windy.com and I believe it's more built for surfers and such (??) - not sure what the best android weather app is.

I still think DarkSky made it easier to visualize the day. With Apple, when I tap on a day to see the details, the temperature and rain forecasts are in two separate graphs, instead of being unified into one easily glanceable view.

This is what I really liked about DarkSky. I didn’t have to read and understand the forecast, I could simply glance at it and intuitively have an understanding of the day’s weather. Apple lost this, and I think it is what gave DarkSky so much value.

> still not a perfect replacement

Not a replacement at all for Android subscribers!

> The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time

Interesting, I think it's gotten worse over time. Even basics like what the temperature will be in a few days. It's consistently ~5+ degrees off on the low side.

Dark Sky was one of my favorite apps. MyRadar Pro is probably the best replacement, but it’s missing some of the core features.

The Apple Weather app absolutely sucks.

I have learned to ignore its predictions. It will say that it's sunny outside, and I'll look out the window, and we're having a hailstorm.

https://weather-sense.leftium.com shows the past two days of weather, could be configured to show up to 90.

- The data is from https://open-meteo.com

- It would be trivial to connect the historical weather API (back to 1940): https://openmeteo.substack.com/p/processing-90-tb-historical...

I have been using breezy weather and I like it overall. But after reading this article I can't help but be bugged off that the information density in the main page is significantly worse here than in Dark Sky. Dark Sky showed hourly forecast with a 2h resolution. This is a negligible difference in precision IMHO (weather predictions are inherently imprecise anyway - and a more precise graph could be - is - one tap away), but it allows to show a time range that is twice as wide! On my screen, breezy weather is able to show me the forecast for the next 5h until I scroll - this is OK, but it's annoying. The hours are very spaced apart, and there is a 1h resolution. With tighter spacing and 2h resolution, 12 or 16 hours could be displayed at once - which is far more likely to cover the time I am going to spend outside, which as the article states, is the main reason why I might want to check an hourly forecast anyway.

All the other android apps mentioned here have the same issue.

I might try to open an issue in their GH, or even a PR... A toggle for "denser graphs" and a setting for hourly resolution could do wonders.

I prefer Bura[1] over it, Breezy doesn't communicate the daily things I need (and that the link talks about) as well for me

1: https://github.com/davidtakac/bura/

Breezy Weather and Weather Master right now are IMO the two best open source weather apps on Android

https://github.com/PranshulGG/WeatherMaster

I liked that idea but found it a little busy so I started working on the weather layout I always wish I had. Heavily inspired by Weather Line, Dark Sky, NOAA line view but attempting to make it single screen: https://www.threads.com/@johnsheehan/post/DTHnd_HDbRM

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squa... offers Android users the chance to customize a home screen widget with similar info.

Yes, this is my main weather app and I think I've recommended it here before. There's another app that's slightly less elegant, but has more knobs to turn in Weathergraph. https://weathergraph.app/

Also see weathergraph that does similar graph and shows the temps etc in a downwards colum,n as well

They've also got a developer interface - https://developer.yr.no

One of the things that I've seen with them that I haven't seen with others is the cloud cover by layer.

https://www.yr.no/en/details/graph/2-6301678/United%20States...

https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-6301678/United%20States...

For doing photography (sunsets) there's a significant difference between 50% high clouds and 50% low clouds.

For the ones who might be interested, Yr.no uses the ECMWF (European weather model) as their main data source. This model scores the best on benchmarks of the global weather models (available for the whole world), but AI models are catching up on some parameters. Still, there are local weather models available with a much higher resolution (these are regional and only have forecasts up to a couple days). Examples are ICON-D2, Arome, Harmonie for parts of Europe, and HRRR for the US. I'm not sure which apps use these models though.

Do they provide a Celsius/Fahrenheit toggle? I can't find it.

+1 to Carrot. I’m a huge fan. The annual subscription is pricey but I travel a lot and it’s consistently one of the most accurate apps I’ve used and I tried a bunch! They even have an “I miss Dark Sky” setting that makes the UI a clone of Dark Sky

They also added the "Inline" theme which is a copy of Dark Sky's

Carrot is a pay app but it has a vertical view that matches Dark Sky in everything but Map, and I use it all the time, mostly with Apple Weather as the source (no source is as good as Dark Sky was (and I compared Dark Sky and Apple Weather when both were overlapping), the others have not been as good at my location).

I don’t know if Carrot can use Apple Weather as a source on Android. Also it seems like the Android version is not in active development.

From my quick research, it seems like people in the sailing community actually prefer Windy.com to Windy.app. (yes, there's a very confusing name clash)

Ventusky and Windy.com are my go to nowadays. They give me a ton of information which enables me to make my own decisions about weather. The ability to change forecasting models really quickly is nice, too. The ventusky android app is pretty decent, too.

On https://weather-sense.leftium.com the colored boxes in the legend at the top are actually checkboxes.

Toggle only the stats you're interested in! The toggle is persisted to localStorage.

I plan to add more stats, like wind speed and direction, but they will all be toggle-able.

As a fan of webapps, https://yr.no is a good no-frills weather webapp.

If you're deciding whether to dress and prepare for rain you're more curious about whether it will rain or not than the amount.

https://weather-sense.leftium.com shows both mm/hr and percentage chance.

I've noticed there is a correlation, but having both is useful:

- Often there is a percentage chance, but the mm/hr is 0. At these times, it could rain but will probably be very light.

- Less common, but sometimes there is 0% chance, but a non-zero mm/hr.

The two things are not strictly related, you could have 30% chance of heavy rain, or 90% chance of light rain. Both are needed and many apps have both.

Most places I look at report both probability and give a measurement prediction.

So it would be like "60% chance of rain after 2pm, total amount less than 1/10th of an inch"

mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.

I just downloaded it to try it out after seeing it in a few comments. While some of the visualizations seem like ones I could get used to and like, the radar is severely lacking. I use radar a lot and DarkSky’s view was amazing and just fun to play with. Weather Graph has it buried at the bottom and just loads up weather.gov. It’s hard to justify paying a premium with radar feeling pretty ignored. His website mentions radar won’t be coming in the near term. I think that’s a deal breaker for me.

They used to be very responsive. “Multiple locations are on the way” (bottom left corner) has been like that for years now.

Still the best of all the weather apps though.

Clicking History, Forecast, and Notifications at the bottom doesn’t seem to do anything.

I still mourn the loss of Weatherspark's old Flash interface, which brilliantly displayed all of this data in a single pane to give context to the recent, current, and forecasted weather. I've never seen as concise a visualization of current and historical weather data.

Because most of Apple's designers do not have the discipline or the blessedly smaller scope to consistently output well designed interfaces anymore, and are riding the momentum of those that came before and the current of hot air of their own supply these days.

The idea that Apple is full of good designers should be forgotten. They're as mid and sloppy as any other large tech company.

Even worse: why do they use high/low based on calendar date rather than daily high and overnight low.

During a cold snap one cold night will show up as the low for two consecutive days instead of a single “overnight”

I still use Wunderground since it utilizes base stations within my own neighborhood, so the data is accurate down to the street level. Its precipitation percentages have also been much more accurate than Apple weather over the last few years (for me).

this is a lil off topic, but fuck the weather channel.

they've been lobbying for like a decade to get NOAA defunded. They're basically the Intuit/turbotax of the meteorology world.

The app is great, but unfortunately it only works in Switzerland. The same company also developed a german version (DWD WarnWetter, works for all of Europe), and recently a worldwide one (Fluid Meteo).

I haven't used Dark Sky but on my Android phone, Meteoswiss is definitely very very good

How does it compare to Dark Sky?

I was an android user when it went offline. When Apple bought it they kind of mothballed it for a year or so, no updates but it still worked. Then they took the apps off the stores, but the API was still enabled for a lil while longer, so other services still functioned for the most part.

Then one day it just stopped working and it all went away. But it took apple ~18 months or so to kill it off, if I remember right.

But there was never any refund or whatnot.

I paid for it and got nothing at all. I don't remember if the app quit working or if Apple force removed it from my phone.I felt absolutely scammed - it's literally the only app I've ever paid for.

It really sucks. Do they use the same data? I've noticed Apple Weather is substantially less accurate than Dark Sky. If Dark Sky told me it was going to rain in 10 minutes for 7 minutes, that's what was going to happen. If Apple Weather says it, well, maybe.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41109799 - July 2024 (196 comments)

A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 - March 2023 (251 comments)

Carrot does this, but Dark Sky was more than just a repeat of weather data from other sources. They built their own geographic models with feedback to create their hyperlocal forecasts. Apple has that technology but their implementation hasn’t seemed to be as good (possibly because their feedback loop is slow).

Stop trying to hold VCs to account as they try to buy all the ram in the world with infinite pretend money and their infinite pretend profits to put in their infinite pretend GPUs and their infinite pretend capacity, supported by the infinite pretend infrastructure that will never exist that we will also be forced to pay for.

Why did you think AI has the capability of creating an app with a ton of care and unique touch put into it as opposed to some hello world/proof of concept skeleton app?

Pebble's back, I thought.

Checkout forecast advisor. It ranks forecasting services for a location and gives you a summary forecast based on all the different services for that location.

Whenever I travel I find it pretty helpful. Certain services are just garbage in some areas.

For example, Foreca is like 84% accurate for my home location, but it's only 60% accurate for one of the cabins I frequent.

If you are on iPhone and can afford it, Carrot Weather can show you Accuweather with Dark Sky’s interface.