I complained on this blog three years ago about the death of Dark Sky, my favorite weather app, after its acquisition by Apple. Even now, years later, Apple Weather still feels like a poor replacement and I often find myself missing Dark Sky.
However, yesterday I learned from my friend Henry that the creators of Dark Sky just last week launched a new weather app called Acme Weather!
My initial impressions are that it looks really nice! Here's what you see when you open the app:
The key new feature is the line chart that shows the range of different forecasts, so you can get a sense of how much uncertainty there is in the forecast. As someone who occasionally uses the Windy app to compare different forecast models, I really love this visualization.
Other nice design features:
- You can swipe backwards on the timeline to view yesterday's weather, or forward to see tomorrow's, and the nice natural text description on top changes too.
- If there's rain coming, the map shows the forecasted daily precipitation totals.
- It's super easy to make a report of your current weather, and easy to view community reports
It's not a perfect replacement for Dark Sky; for example, it doesn't have the vertical bar that used different colors to intuitively communicate weather conditions over the day. Dark Sky did a great job focusing on precipitation intensity rather than the % chance of precipitation (the latter is a useless metric, IMO), while Acme Weather still requires an extra swipe and tap to view precipitation intensity. Maybe some of these things were part of the Dark Sky IP that's now owned by Apple.
But I'm still way more excited to use this over Apple Weather. (I'm super happy to give them my money, too—it's free for 2 weeks, and then $25 a year afterwards.) You should go download it and give it a try!
