This week in App Smart, I wrote about a rather unusual class: Weather prediction apps designed to be simple or beautiful, and almost the antithesis of a brash TV weather report. Unlike watching a weather report on TV or reading one in a paper, an app of this type places interactive weather data in your hands, and can even make learning about coming rain or windstorms a very interesting experience.
One of my favorites is Partly Cloudy. It’s a $2 iOS app that turns the weather forecast for your location into an interactive circular infographic. When it loads, the app shows a clock-like display that graphs weather data like temperature, rainfall and wind strength in a circle, with a marker telling you the current time and conditions. For example, wind is represented as a gray-colored graph that is taller when the wind is stronger, while rain is a blue graph that grows and shrinks to show more or less rain predicted as you glance around the “clock.†It’s visually appealing, and it actually works You really can tell in one moment roughly what the coming weather is. The app even lets the clock represent a week, 12 hours or 24 hours, so you can quickly get a sense of whether it will rain that night or be blustery the next day, for example.
If there is one criticism of this app it is about the way of dialing forward to future weather predictions, which is done by dragging a marker around the clock to move it symbolically forward or backward in time. This can quickly lead to confusion about what actual date the graphs on the display relate to.
A different app that avoids this sort of problem thanks to its extreme simplicity is the free Android app Sunny. This app is extremely minimalist in design. Its display consists of large sheets of plain color that indicate the current weather prediction. For example, a partly cloudy but warm day is represented as a yellow segment and a gray segment. On top of these colors some very straightforward text reports the current temperature and foreca! st in large print, with words like “mostly sunny†or “cloudy.†The next two days of weather are printed beneath this in smaller text. The app is very easy on the eye, and will give you a good sense of the weather forecast in a second or two.
Another colorful app similar to Sunny is Haze, a $1 iOS app. It too has a minimalist display whose text and color react to the weather forecast, but this app contains slightly more detailed information to which you gain access via gestures. It’s designed to be both eye-pleasing and informative about weather predictions.
One advantage of all these apps is that they make weather predictions very simple to see, which could make them handy educational tools. It may be fun to play with them with your children, using the displays to teach them about how wind, sun and rain all interact to create the weather outside.
Quick CallMicrosoft has finally brought its powerful Photosynth panoramic photo app to Windows Phone 8. The app can be used to generat beautiful and surprising images of places and objects, and can even capture the entire 360-degree view to the left, right, up and down of the photographer’s position. It’s free on the Windows Phone app store.
