Nit: it redirected me to San Diego weather after a few seconds after I had already put in a different location. Maybe because I block the location request?
1) It should attempt to detect location and display that to the user.
2) You can save locations but, these are lost on refresh.
3) No way to specify Celsius.
4) It's not a very simple service. I should be able to bookmark this and click on the link to view the weather. Instead, I need to type a location every time. Right now, I just have a bookmark to "https://www.google.com/search?q=weather".
Yep for something like this I'm definitely for a text interface, and I had to do the same with a quick php cli script using yahoo's api. For some reason weather.com just keeps getting slower and slower. I switched to accuweather for a bit but got tired of it too.
Their 10-day weather graph is one of my favorite interfaces. There is no better way to grasp the weather, and it transformed my conception of daily weather patterns. Try it:
> This site is still maintained by us, it's not dead. We use a weather API, so if you're wondering why it may not match what you're seeing, check here.
They probably should choose a smaller area to make this useful (for somebody).
When I search !weather it ships me off to weather.com. I REALLY don't want that to happen. If I wanted to go there, I would have just typed in that URL.
I second weather dot gov mapclick. This makes me want to finally fix my PWA that used the Dark Sky API that quit working in 2023. This PWA also had a feature to click an icon and feed the long/lat into the mapclick URL which is the feature I used most often. I had a bookmark for a free replacement API for Dark Sky (that I got from HN) but have since re-formatted my computer. I know slightly off topic, but does anyone have a recommendation for a good free (couple users a day) weather API? Any suggestions would be appreciated as this has given me the motivation to hook it back up. Cheers.
It does seem like something's wrong when http://weather.gov is the best place to get weather (within the US, of course.) I just wish NOAA had an iPhone app!
On the main page, I thought it was nifty that it autodetected my location and gave the current weather, but then I couldn't find any link to actually find the forecast!
Then I thought to click on the name of the town. That gave me a page of which less than 1/3 was actual content (until I scrolled down). This seems like exceedingly poor design. Although, the actual "Forecast" div is reasonably compact, so there might be some URL hack you can do to jump straight to that.
It's too bad; I was a wunderground user for years until they did a site upgrade that kept causing browser crashes; I've been on weather.com for quite a while now, and this upgrade doesn't look good enough to entice me back.
I actually like it a lot. Here's what I really like about it:
Auto IP lookup. It pulls up exactly the city I would get using weather.com.
Clean & Simple. You give me the information I want and get out of my way.
Design. It's very well designed for what it is.
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Here's what I don't like about it:
The comments. They aren't really useful or relevant. I suppose if you ever gain "critical mass" this might start to be useful, but I have my doubts. There's no guidance as to what I should be saying and why.
4 day Forecast. I think this deserves a little more priority on the page. I also feel like a horizontal format is more appropriate, but go with your gut. What you've done now looks pretty damn good for a small project.
Indentation. The text could use a little more structure than just indenting everywhere. This could just be nitpicky.
URL. .info's make me cry. just find a small, 3-5 letter work that's easy to remember, tack it on to weather, and get the .com. I prefer to http://bustaname.com because my super-smart friend made it.
I like it (the usage of ascii chars to draw the weather, the usage of arrow for wind direction, the articulation on temperate with color)
The geolocation is off (as usual) because it uses the same DB as ipleak.net and others which is wrong for my (semi static) cable IPv4. I don't mind though, I just add some city.
It doesn't show well in a standard 80x25 terminal either, and that I do mind. That's my main issue with it.
So I ended up with:
n=0 ; while (( $n <= 72 )) ; date ; do curl wttr.in/~Amsterdam?0 ; sleep 1200 ; n=$(( n+1 )) ; done
Which grabs the weather every 20 min for 24 hours straight after which it has to be restarted. Not sure how it deals with laptop's suspend though.
watch -cn 1200 didn't work for me because while it does parse the ascii colors, it doesn't show them.
Since that hammers the servers though I'd write an alias for wttr.in/~Amsterdam?0 such as 'gcw' ("get current weather") or something like that.
Anyway, instead of having a dedicated terminal for this open (e.g. in Tmux) its probably better to queue for this every X minutes in Tmux statusbar as someone else suggested.
For now though I just use the KNMI application on Android though which gives a notification in the morning and evening about the weather (the evening one also describing the forecast for next day). Its basically as if watching the weather forecast on TV. I get the notification on my smartwatch as well (Pebble 2).
Also, this doesn't beat Android's Buienalarm push notification service which alerts you right before it is going to rain on current location plus locations you specified (home, work, family, etc)
Looking at it right now, here would be my initial feedback and some ideas:
- Depending on where you're located, I'm not sure if you've noticed that when there is a space in the city name it throws a %20 in there instead of space. Probably need a url decode on there... interestingly, this issues goes away when I just the locate button within the map and location services are triggered.
- It seems to find my location without actually prompting, are you using an IP lookup or something instead of location services? It seems to work, but having the ability to also specify a location where I'm not at would be good (I'm sure this is planned). As mentioned above, the location services are called when using the map locate button, so I imagine the bug in the first bullet is related to the 2 different methods of gathering location.
- I'm not sure if showing the a date or two in the past is for your testing or on purpose, but I kind of like it. People seem to ask me all the time if it rained yesterday, so having an easy reference for things like that is nice. For something really extra... something that shows what the forecast was vs what actually happened would be really interesting for getting a sense of how accurate the forecasts were. Presenting something like that well, so it's easy and obvious would be a big UI challenge. I know a lot of people complain about weather apps having bad data and are always looking for a better one. Having actual data every time the site/app is opened that shows how far off it was would go a long way to prove those criticisms right or wrong. My trust in a weather report would go way up if I regularly saw those deltas were small.
- A way to visually see temperature and precipitation for the full 7 day forecast is always the main thing I'm looking for. High and low temp, graphed, for the week (this is the one thing Apple did take from Dark Sky that I still like). Inter-day temps for each day in a similar format to the week. And the precipitation like you have it (or as an area chart). I did really like the Dark Sky way of having a vertical bar for the precipitation, with the temps plotted next to it. I think that made it easier to see the separation between the days, while having everything horizontal makes it all blend together a little more.
- I'm not totally sure what's going on with the 3 precipitation forecast bars. It looks like 2 of them have a current time marker. I'm going to assume this is you playing with different ways to show it, 24hr vs 48hr? My initial gut thought for the current weather view is a 24 hour bar with 4 hours in the past and 20 hours into the future (for temp and precipitation). Then the 7 day forecast can show 24 hours at a time for each day, which could be expanded or collapsed.
- A way to change between imperial and metric measures would be good. Right now I'm seeing the temp in Fahrenheit, while the distance and precipitation is in metric, so it's a bit of a mix out of the box.
- Sunrise / Sunset timing is something I find useful, though I have it on my phone's lock screen at this point.
- Something I've recently discovered in Apple's weather app is the Averages tile. I've started using this a lot any time I'm looking at traveling somewhere, so I can get an idea of when to go or how to pack. This isn't a critical MVP feature at all, so I wouldn't prioritize it. But if you end up taking this really far, that is something I find pretty useful and cool.
- Just spitballing... I wonder if the 7 day forecast bars would be good all lined up horizontally with a horizontal scroll to look into the future, so it's more like looking through a calendar week. I think this might make it easier for someone to more easily see it will ran in 3 days, rather than having to know today is Friday and it says it will rain on Tuesday, which is 4 days away. This would be another UI challenge to do well without it being a cramped mess. It would probably need to default to a collapsed view, then clicking on a day would expand that day's bar to show more details.
- I assume all the json data is for your own testing
Nit: it redirected me to San Diego weather after a few seconds after I had already put in a different location. Maybe because I block the location request?
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