* Adopt a colour scheme with similarity to the old BOM?
* Some way to store longer baseline movie animations in local state so people can avoid cost in you but run the weather radar for longer?
* Tide info? Hyper specific to people who do water things. Willyweather does this really well.
I use Willyweather and Windy. I used to use a weather app written by some mob called "shifty jelly" and their git logs were .. hysterical. Drunk fairy penguins seemed to cause most of the bugs.
Dataviz suggestions from top of the page to the bottom:
- Location search & display: no English version, only localized names, which is hard to reason if you don't know native language.
- Summary: a) what does precip. in % mean and how it correlates with cm? b) pressure is only displayed in hPa, while some countries prefer mmHg; c) what does ozone index mean and why is it important?
- Next 24 hours: visual indication for temp variation through the day would be easier to reason than just by looking at numbers (as discussed in TFA).
- Next 7 days:
a) unnecessary precision for y-axis (e.g. 10.9°C vs. 11°C);
b) band overshoot actual values (e.g. if I see 10..−10°C, I assume that would be max/min temp, but in fact it is 8..−9°C, which is impossible to tell without hovering mouse over);
c) no horiz. line through 0°C;
d) no horiz. lines through y-axis ticks, which makes it harder to reason about values closer to the end of the graph;
e) precip. in cm tells little, especially when band is alike (0.00..0.80 cm) - peaks on graphs look like a lot, in fact they are not? g) seeing blue precip. graph subconsciously means 'rain' to me, while in fact it would be snow;
f) labels for y-axis are at the same time very small, rotated 90° and also take too much horizontal space from the graph.
- Map: moving mouse over next 7 days graph causes time shown on map to change that would make sense if map's timeline would cover all 7 days, but it only covers small part of today.
- Week:
a) fog icons look like they have solid white square background, which seems to be off compared to other icons;
b) low/high values are hard to reason about, especially when it says 'Low … at 11am' and there is no tick labeled '11am' (10am .. 12pm) - displaying a line through coldest/warmest hours with °C value next to it would be much easier to understand.
Also: displaying air quality prediction based on last year's AQ would be helpful.
Could you tell me the significance of the location in Australia that's used by default? I frequently clear browser cookies and history so it often jumps back there, so I see that location a lot, but can never envision exactly why it was the default. (Specifically, a point along Gol Gol Road in Arumpo, NSW, Australia.)
His parser was built around xpath/css-selectors and it blew my mind at the time. I was interning at a company that built hundreds of web scrapers around regexes, Perl 5 and some other in-house DSL. I was wrapping up my university classes on theory of computation and compilers. Although I never made a career in that field, this was perfect timing and it allowed me to connect the dots. One day, I introduced the more senior employees to the limitations of regexes, capabilities that an html parser could bring to our projects as well as some freshly learned theory of context free grammars :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
Do you know if Ragel be used to parse context free grammars? I couldn't easily understand how. Context free grammar parsers have to be Turing Complete no?
Apple never integrated the hourly precipitation timelines which I relied on day to day. I was scared I was gonna miss it so I recently worked on a replacement called merrysky. It's backed by the awesome pirateweather.net API
Merry Sky looks great. You've really captured that nice line between detail and 'at-a-glance' that made Dark Sky a pleasure to use. Thanks!
On my Desktop, I use accuweather and occasionally https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/ - among so many others. None really gave me a UI that I felt comfortable using. Always clicking to get additional data or overloaded with non-vital information.
On Android - after the Dark Sky fiasco - I settled on Yr[0] eventually.
Merry Sky looks poised to replace my Desktop weather links already (I use my own local custom home page). On Android, the (home icon) link leads to a really nice looking "Android App". Yr will be harder to replace but Merry Sky has already found a home here (just need time to verify its accuracy).
Thanks, I'm really shooting for that sweet spot on information density. I think it's in a good shape to be shared now but I'll be iterating on it based on feedback and my own ideas going forward.
Yr looks really nice too but I don't carry a droid day to day.
I'd like to keep merrysky as a lightweight alternative on the web and have the same experience regardless of the platform/OS
Dark sky has hour by hour by percent probability as well as projected precipitation.
Apple has a rounded percent in two hour blocks. And its numbers are different. For example, Apple shows the moon and stars icon for 6pm; DS shows 28% and .01 inch/hour.
Apple consistently has less information and I’ll miss DarkSky. I paid $5 and don’t usually buy apps.
I'm relying on it in Canada now so I can certainly vouch for it in my area. We had a snowstorm and power outages during holidays and it was great to follow the graphs with regards to wind/gust and precipitations.
I switched to Accuweather after IBM ruined WeatherUnderground App. Still not as good as the old Wunderground app but it is 90-95% what I liked about the WU
unless i'm missing something I've been able to see the precipitation timelines for some time now in their weather app and widget, at least an hour out. (e.g. "Light rain is expected to stop in 17 min")
this was one of my favorite features too but afaict they integrated it (i'm on ios 16.3)
I'm on 16.2, unless they revamped it all in that minor update, it's not cutting it for me. I know that there's a precipitation bar chart but it's a lot of toggling back and forth. I want to see a few days of precipitation and their accumulation/intensity in the same screen for planning out activities. Also, with this new website I will be able to keep browsing that data on desktop as well.
Hi, it's possible you were looking at it in Celcius? It currently defaults to to the SI unit preset (displayed at the top right of the page) if you had not selected a preference yet. I will be changing that soon to be smarter and default to the unit based on location. This link should be good for you in the meantime: https://merrysky.net/forecast/44.9603383,-93.350066/us
If you're still seeing a discrepancy, feel free to email me with the debugging information so we can clear that up. feedback@merrysky.net
Hi, as mentioned in the post and on the website, it is using pirateweather.net, not Open Weather (are you referring to openweathermap.org?). If you are curious, the author is transparent about the methodology to achieve the API and what are the shortcomings.
It would be interesting if you could evaluate this properly and submit feedback again. What is your criteria for correctness? Do you share your samples collected? If I understand correctly you also concluded dark sky was unreliable (1.5). This does not match my experience (Canada). In which way?
When I open https://pirateweather.net it says "An Open Weather Forcast API", I think it's pretty clear if you are using "Pirate Weather" you are really using just Open Weather data source.
As for accuracy, it's mostly about false positives/negatives regarding rain, I don't care whether temperature is right to the degree Celsius, but I care if source says it's gonna rain and then it doesn't and vice versa.
Of course your experience may vary, though not sure why you mention Dark Sky accuracy when we talk here Open Weather used by your site.
Beyond the subtitle "Open Weather", it doesn't have anything related to what I believe you are referring to: Open Weather Map (OpenWeather Ltd) https://openweathermap.org/
In the case of pirateweather.net, "Open" is referencing to the fact that the processing and transforms are openly divulged. Read this http://docs.pirateweather.net/en/latest/ it's interesting
I mentioned darksky because you listed it as part of your evaluation and it was not graded good. This means you were not satisfied already with the approach and results in your region at least.
I also care the most about daily and hourly precipitations and how intense they get
So from your linked document it seems they are using these sources:
> Starting from the beginning, three NOAA models are used for the raw forecast data: HRRR, GFS, and the GEFS.
Though I don't understand why they use very very confusing term "An Open Weather Forcast API" including typo (quite unprofessional), which will anyone familiar with weather data sources take as Open Weather (Map).
I'm the dev behind the Pirate Weather API. I really appreciate your feedback here, since I missed that typo, but it's fixed now.
I went through a ton of iterations of the subtitle, since it's a tricky thing to get right. I think the "Open" part is important, but agree that I don't want it to be confused with "Open Weather Map". I've retitled it to "A Free, Open, and Documented Forecast API", which is a little wordy, but might be better
If you change the setting from the top right it should stick the setting in the url and this will be used for follow up searches. For instance this uses the `us` preset with imperial units:
If no setting is chosen it currently defaults to SI units. It's not ideal even from my perspective, wind speed in m/s is hard to grasp compared to km/h. In a near update I'd like to have it default to the unit of measurement culturally used at the location of the forecast and allow to save it to user local storage settings for more consistency.
Nice to hear that the instructions for home icon are working well on Android as I only tested the ones on iOS :D
I agree on the weekly graph being a bit of a distraction. I thought about hiding it especially on mobile. We had a snowstorm and power outage because of strong winds over the holidays. I found it useful to get a general sense of safety with regards to wind speed/gust (up to 110km/h!) and precipitations. In the end, I decided to leave it there initially and maybe confine it to its own section later from the general feedback.
Your feedback on the map is great. I've held off on working on it now since it's a considerable effort and I don't have an API ready to consume that gives that. I wasn't really relying on it from the darksky website but it's definitely on my mind. Other than looking cute, I think there's good value in the precipitation overlay too.
Sure. I just spent a few minutes poking back through the other weather apps I've got installed on my phone to see how their radar maps look. The two I like best are Windy and Ventusky. Both feel pretty readable in terms of background layer and cloud colors, and have fairly good animation of the clouds. Not sure where they're drawing that virtual imagery from.
