Over time I've became weary of iPhone weather apps. The weatheroffice site of Environment Canada has pretty good weather predictions, if you don't mind reading through its prose, which is not too efficient. On the other hand, the app from The Weather Network had lots of stats in a clunky UI. The app from the weather underground is just overwhelming with stats.
There are a few free sites for the iPhone that are minimalist in their presentation, but they fail in many ways. Sun has a clunky UI that requires pinch to zoom for its basic operations, and has quite frankly cryptic icons, and purely esthetic color scheme and CPU hungry animations. Degreees only shows the temperature, which is great in California but is useless for variation-prone weather like Montréal's.
And so I was pleasantly surprised by S°lar, a simple, $1 app that in a few one-handed gestures shows you, by colour and animations, the weather and temperature at a glance. There are great details, for examples how the hour-by-hour forecast is displayed by a clock that progressively goes forward in time as you scroll up all the while the display's colours and animations morph into the hour's forecast. Or how, this evening, the thunderstorm was making the phone vibrate and the display flash, even when zoomed out while displaying multiple cities (of course you can turn off the vibrations, which I did). Oh, and yes, Celcius is supported in the settings (accessible when you zoom out). Also, I just noticed that the rain falls in the right direction when you tilt the phone.
Looks amazing, great UI, and simple. I think I found my new default weather app.
Published on July 23, 2012 at 21:24 EDT
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