Show HN: Merry Sky, Dark Sky replacement and merry-timeline open source lib

[guillohm]

Hello HN,

This is a website I worked on during the holidays to fill the void of the upcoming dark sky shutdown. For me, the precipitation timeline was a view I was heavily relying on for everyday activities and planning. I had not found any replacement from the various weather apps. When I found pirateweather.net as a backend API, it gave me the motivation to put the pieces together and get back the experience I enjoyed. I then added more functionalities that I think was missing from the website such as a weekly chart view. I've been using the website reliably over christmas holidays. Hope you enjoy it too!

Also I open sourced the visual component for drawing the precipitation timeline and you can use it for drawing weather information or any other hourly activities really https://github.com/guillaume/merry-timeline

Interested in your feedback!

[Evidlo]

I've been using MerrySky for a few days and one thing that I'm missing is how DarkSky presented day-by-day temperature, like the image on the right here: [0]

The plot at the top of MerrySky is harder to quickly grok the min and max temperatures each day of the week. In my opinion, people would prefer to see min/max temperatures and then click to expand to see the hourly temperature and precipitation forecast.

[0]: https://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/dark-s...

[acemarke]

This looks great! I have loved the UI of Dark Sky (to the point of continuing to use the "Darker Sky" modified APK for Android, which is now due to die off in the next few days). So, seeing a replacement for the desktop site is wonderful. Also, I did try out the "Add to Home" instructions for mobile, and that works nicely!

I was about to comment that the multi-value graph at the top of the page was distracting and taking up space. Looking at it again, I can see a bit more use out of it, although perhaps still not my first preference. Comparing it vs the current Dark Sky site, I do prefer the existing large current temperature value as the initial visual focus.

The other thing I love about Dark Sky is the visual appearance and the resolution of the precipitation radar map on mobile, including the timing of animating the radar updates over time and the coloring of the base globe. I've tried out a bunch of other Android apps and haven't found anything that _quite_ replicates that. If you could reasonably replicate that, it'd be really neat.

Thanks for putting this together!

[guillohm]

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.

[acemarke]

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.

[petodo]

This use infamous extremely unreliable Open Weather data source, so while it's nice there is API and you built website, it's not much of use if data it provides is useless. Form over function.

For instance this was accuracy result for Prague in data collected over 6 weeks in forecasts where sources provided different forecast (how many out of 6 correct): AerisWeather 5.5, Foreca 4, MET Norway 4, AccuWeather 2, Dark Sky 1.5, WeatherBit 1.5, Open Weather 1, World Weather Online 1

And I still keep collecting these data and it's not changing.

[guillohm]

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?

[petodo]

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.

[guillohm]

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

[petodo]

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).

[alexander0042]

Hi,

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

[st-angel]

Is there a way to default my units to F? Based on my location it defaults to C but I prefer to use F. Thanks!

[guillohm]

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:

https://merrysky.net/forecast/poughkeepsie/us

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.

[lfconsult]

Wonderful piece of work. Clear and fast. Didn't know pirateweather before. Thanks for sharing.

[tunapizza]

Neat! And right on time. Bookmarking this.

[guillohm]

Thx, if you want to add it to your home screen as an icon on your device, I posted the instructions https://merrysky.net/faq