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by Leftium 754 days ago
Thanks for the feedback!

- I have sometimes noticed the `%20` issue; it should be simple to fix. (The location name can come from multiple sources.)

- The app first tries to estimate your location based on your IP address. There is less friction (no additional prompts/permission required) but it can be very inaccurate. Eventually, you will be able to specify most settings/input via UI and/or URL params. For example, you will be able to enter all or none of: lat/lng, location name, C/F, etc. When a value isn't provided, a logical default will be used (like lat/lng from location name, or location name from lat/lng).

- Showing previous dates is very intentional (https://blog.leftium.com/2013/12/how-to-display-temperature-...). Weather stats are very relative, so "trendcasts" combine past history with future forecasts. (Also see the previous version: https://uw.leftium.com/)

- "I did really like the Dark Sky way of having a vertical bar for the precipitation, with the temps plotted next to it." I'm not sure exactly how that looked. Can you share any screenshots?

- The daily precipitation forecast bars will have an option to toggle showing the previous history. I was playing around with how they would look. The "current time" marker will track the cursor/finger on hover so you can see exact numbers in the sticky top section (Merry Sky sort of has this, but it's not sticky and hover only works in a few places.)

- You can already click any temperature stats to toggle between Fahrenheit and Celsius. I default to F because I still believe it is the more "human" metric for weather temperature. I use mm for precipitation because I feel that is the more useful unit for precipitation, but in the future this will also be configurable/togglable.

- Sunrise/sunset is one of the features I plan to steal from Merry Sky. The data is available in the JSON, but Merry-Timeline doesn't support rendering like Merry Sky (https://github.com/guillaume/merry-timeline/issues/4). I will probably end up writing my own forecast timeline component.

- Merry Sky already kind of has forecast bars lined up horizontally; I think shading the days with alternating colors would make it more readable. Openweather also has this (although it also needs to shade to make the days more distinguishable, too.) I'm not a big fan of horizontal scrolling, but I may add it as an option.

1 comments

>Showing previous dates is very intentional

Excellent. Happy to hear it. This is the same reason I was thinking to add several hours of history in the daily forecast as well. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this matters.

>"I did really like the Dark Sky way of having a vertical bar for the precipitation, with the temps plotted next to it." I'm not sure exactly how that looked. Can you share any screenshots?

This is a good overview.

https://www.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/DarkSky...

Pic 1: The area graph with the heavy, mid, light show the rain for the next hour if it's going to rain. If I remember correctly this went away when it wasn't going to rain. Below that is the vertical upcoming forecast, hour by hour... with the temps shown show it is easy to visually see if the temp is going up or down.

Pic 2: The full view of the current forecast. The pill allow the user to see different metrics in the same format.

Pic 3: The week ahead, showing the low and high for each day. Tapping on any of these days expands the day to show it in the same format as the current format in pic 2. Time Machine at the bottom would let you go look at stuff in the past, but kind of out of the way, that's where I think it would be useful to bring it into the last day or two.

Pic 4: The map. It was a pretty cool map, zooming out would expand to a 3D globe that could be spun around any which way. It was pretty satisfying. (pic 2 here - https://cdn.macstories.net/001/2018-08-21-10-56-21.png)

- You can already click any temperature stats to toggle between Fahrenheit and Celsius. I default to F because I still believe it is the more "human" metric for weather temperature. I use mm for precipitation because I feel that is the more useful unit for precipitation, but in the future this will also be configurable/togglable.

Cool. I agree that F is the more human temp. I'm in the US, so I use F. It was the mm I was looking to change, thought that's not as big of a deal as the temp. I have garage inches vs cm/mm better than I can F vs C.

>Merry Sky already kind of has forecast bars lined up horizontally

It might help if I illustrated what I was trying to talk about.

This is kind of what I had in my head...

https://imgur.com/ibEvZR8

So the upcoming week reads more like a week in a calendar (left to right). In one chart I can see the high and low each day, along with the precipitation forecast details for each day... and I can intuitively see all of this visually. Tapping on a bar would expand it out, like the right side of the image, where the intraday temps (or whatever else) could be seen, and the rain bar would grow to the full height to see details and line it up with the hours.

At first it's simple, but it has depth to the data once interacted with. But even in the simple view it gives a lot of information at a glance.

(forgive the text temps not really being correct based on where they are in the image. I set them all and then rearranged everything a bit to clean it up).

Thanks for the images~ I used to use DarkSky myself, but I had completely forgotten about the vertical precipitation bars!

The "minutely" 60 minute precipitation forecast (graph) is one of the reasons I am re-writing my weather app: I was constantly using other weather apps because my app was missing the 60 minutely forecast. Unfortunately Open-Meteo doesn't provide minutely data, and I wasn't able to get the Apple WeatherKit API working. My plan is to merge the minutely data from https://openweathermap.org

I stole the radar map from Merry Sky because it didn't seem too difficult add. I thought https://www.windy.com used to let you zoom out all the way to a globe, but maybe it was a different service?

My current idea is show all the precipitation timelines in a compact "grid" next to where the weather icons are currently rendered. The tick marks will only be shown for the currently "active" day so the grid can be more compact. The precipitation timelines will also overlay the temperature graphed as a sparkline. The sparklines will be normalized so all the timelines share the same min/max temperature.

Hovering/touching a timeline moves the vertical red tracker line and updates the stats in the sticky top section, so you can see the exact numbers. I may also add "ghost" trackers on the other timelines so it is easier to compare the other days.

I wonder how my idea would compare to your idea for vertical timelines?

Sounds interesting. I'll keep an eye on it. Good luck with it. I know a lot of people who feel a bit lost without Dark Sky, so as crowded as the weather app market is, it seems like there is still a gap to fill.