| ▲ | iamcoder18 3 hours ago |
| This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM. |
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| ▲ | e2le 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive. |
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| ▲ | kevincox 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily. The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed. We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory. | |
| ▲ | charleslmunger 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse. | | |
| ▲ | galad87 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM. | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible. | |
| ▲ | anthk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Vector icons. It can be fit under 50MBs. | | |
| ▲ | pixelesque an hour ago | parent [-] | | Those still have to be rasterised to a pixel-based frame buffer at render/compositing time. |
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| ▲ | useasvg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Use an svg. Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with. | | |
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| ▲ | puzzleincomplet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | cyberrock 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this depends on your location, because in some places you really want to view a radar map. "Rain in $CITY" is practically useless for me. Still, the (static?) map in the depicted app shouldn't take 1GB. |
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| ▲ | karmakurtisaani 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes. Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran. |
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| ▲ | whynotmaybe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start | | |
| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Had to get a ride to drive floppies with corrected config.sys and autoexec.bat files around to friends. Things weren’t actually worse. |
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| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code. | |
| ▲ | big85 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM. | | |
| ▲ | drdaeman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | ESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total. | | |
| ▲ | 2Gkashmiri 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Windows really I'd shitty for "assuming" unlimited ram, storage, processing, internet budget for them to get away with it. They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS |
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| ▲ | keicwifjwud 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Back in my day Back in my day systems used to be a lot simpler too. These “back in my mind” comparisons show a clear lack of understanding of the subject matter. 1996 apps are not the same as 2026 apps. Expectations are different. Design languages are different. Even the UX is entirely different. 1GB is clearly overkill, no question. But ~100MB to ~300MB is perfectly reasonable and you know it. |
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| ▲ | p1mrx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip: https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse... https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu... |
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| ▲ | lousken 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less. |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics. |
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| ▲ | benj111 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though. |
