A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)

https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/

by skadamat • 2 years ago

378 196 2 years ago

Dark Sky was their lesser product. Their "lines" interface at forecast.io/lines before they rebranded was peak weather UI, but the internet has almost no record of it ever existing.

LordKeren• 2 years ago

The dark sky API was the backbone of several tinkering projects that I built when first getting in to coding. Fond memories and many thanks to the dark sky devs

i80and2• 2 years ago

Dark Sky was genuinely the most irreplaceable app I've ever used. I don't think I'll ever forgive Apple's butchering it for spare parts.

chatmasta11• 2 years ago

Have you used the latest Weather app? Which DarkSky features is it missing?

flkiwi5• 2 years ago

The unmatched clarity and simplicity of the data. The Weather app isn't in the same league. To my eye, it's a cluttered, gaudy mess, certainly compared to Dark Sky.

Carrot Weather has a mode that is almost a replacement for Dark Sky, btw, though the location-based alerts have gotten less and less reliable over the years (which I am completely unable to understand).

walls• 2 years ago

There's a link at the top of this comment section that goes over it.

joeconway2• 2 years ago

% cloud cover by hour

nycdatasci• 2 years ago

With DarkSky, you used to be able to report current weather conditions. Augmenting weather modeling from sensors with real-time reports from users is critical for high levels of accuracy. Somehow this seems to have been completely overlooked in the integration with Apple's weather app.

writeslowly• 2 years ago

If I wanted to see the heat index at 3PM in Dark Sky, I could just tap the "feels like" button under the hourly forecast (pictured further down in the linked blog post) and look at what it says at 3PM.

I just tried in Apple Weather, and the process was:

1. Tap on the hourly forecast, or the day, to go into the graph screen

2. Tap on the dropdown icon

3. Tap "feels like"

4. Either drag your finger along the graph until the time indicator at the top indicates you're close to 3PM, then read the temperature, or you can try to read it directly off the graph, but the axes aren't labeled clearly enough to make this feasible

boringg3• 2 years ago

Weather app is no where near as accurate and its slow (especially on any radar work). The features may be there but they aren't well implemented.

jghn2• 2 years ago

The biggest thing I find Weather to be missing is hyperlocal & timely accuracy.

While I understand the UI complaints others have, for the handful of things I normally want to see I find Weather fine enough vs Dark Sky. BUT, the accuracy took a noticeable downward trend.

metabagel7• 2 years ago

It doesn’t seem to be nearly as accurate. I’ve abandoned the Apple Weather app in favor of The Weather Channel App, because the former seemed unreliable to me.

jefb• 2 years ago

The feature where it tells me the weather.

I'd say there's about a 80% chance that it loads the forecast in under 5 seconds.

Loading the radar has far worse performance - it only works ~50% of the time and failures just show an empty map forever.

When it does manage to load the weather I've found the accuracy to be hot garbage.

whyenot2• 2 years ago

It's crap. No offense intended if you are on the team maintaining Apple Weather, but the interface is much more busy than DarkSky was and there is a lot less clarity and simplicity in how weather information is displayed. My impression is that the quality of the forecasts is also not as good, but that might just be my personal bias.

The fact that Apple chose to shut down one of the best apps on the iPhone in order to promote Apple Weather is still really irritating. I keep Darksky in the app graveyard on my phone, next to Apollo.

wlesieutre2• 2 years ago

The first year of the new weather app they didn't even give you hourly precipitation chance throughout the day. If I had to pick what were the two key features of Dark Sky it would be 1) impending rain notifications, and 2) hourly precipitation chances.

It's included now, but still not as well as Dark Sky did it.

For an app not trying to reproduce Dark Sky, but doing a nice job with an overview of the day's weather, I've been using Overlook. But now I'm seeing that its app store listing is gone. https://apps.apple.com/app/overlook-weather/id1639571738

user3939382• 2 years ago

I’ve been using Carrot. Okay but also not as good.

robgibbons• 2 years ago

As an Android user who had a Dark Sky subscription, I have a similar sentiment.

kernal• 2 years ago

Today Weather has precipitation alters and its UI is, IMO, better than that of Dark Sky. If you're looking for a free app there is also Weawow. Both allow the use of Apple's weather data.

lynndotpy3• 2 years ago

To put it gently, Apple destroyed a fantastically valuable piece of software and made my life worse. Since then, Apple has failed to come close to offering in their weather app what DarkSky offered for years prior.

Besides the API, besides the hyper-local (and, in my experience, _always_ accurate) forecasts, besides the excellent visualizations, besides the nice web app, what I miss most was the history.

I loved the history. It was perhaps DarkSky's least appreciated feature.

You could search (at least within the US) for any date in the past few decades, and find the temperature and precipitation and whatnot for a given location.

You could see what the weather was like on those important dates in your life. You could see what the weather was like the day after those important dates in your life.

It's a little bit of memory that's been excised from the commons. It still makes me sad.

deveac• 2 years ago

As a motorcycle rider and someone who goes top-down in my Jeep all summer, the real-time incoming rain alerts of DS were freakishly accurate and I leaned on them constantly. Apple integrated the feature and they became comically inaccurate. (The opposite of an accurate rain forecast is not great.) After getting soaked one too many times, I finally got frustrated enough to chase down the best replacement. Don't love Carrot Weather near as much, but it is the best alternative I've found for heads up on incoming precipitation. Sigh. I still remember the days of getting a "moderate rain starting in 13 minutes" alert and hoping on the bike and zipping home in time. Don't know how they did it so well.

ProxCoques2• 2 years ago

Yes! The history! Why such an obviously useful feature isn't in all weather apps, I shall never know. Along with the usage you mention, I was always wanting to know at least what the temperature was yesterday so that I could work out what to wear or do today.

I'd go as far to say that the absence of past weather data in most weather apps is symbolic of the wider state of design today. Anyone with any real design knowledge, any basic capacity to synthesize argument or think about problems, would find it obvious that showing past weather is useful because it provides context. So many statistical apps (so-called "dashboards") are such drek because of this too.

fundad• 2 years ago

It's unlikely there were enough paying customers to pay the bills, especially compute; and Dark Sky willingly exited.

wsatb• 2 years ago

Something changed before Apple even bought it. It was not nearly as accurate by the time Apple bought it. I do still miss the app, but the data or the algorithm changed before the purchase.

mekal2• 2 years ago

i noticed the same exact thing. i thought weather had been solved with dark sky. then at some point something got messed up. i would love to know the full story behind this.

al_borland• 2 years ago

Same. If Apple had any sense they would have just slapped an Apple logo on Dark Sky and called it the new weather app, then used it to influence their core design language throughout the rest of the OS.

I’m using the weather app now, but am still longing for the spiritual successor to Dark Sky.

I had a similar feeling when Google bought and killed Sparrow. They should have simply replaced the Gmail app with Sparrow, instead, they killed the only email client I ever genuinely enjoyed using.

sdenike• 2 years ago

I feel like I wrote this lol. I couldn’t agree more with every aspect of your comment. The loss of Sparrow was a sad day, only to be topped with how Apple handled DarkSky.

soheil• 2 years ago

Honestly, thinking that Apple will ever give a damn about individual apps is like expectin a cat to learn calculus.

mekal2• 2 years ago

this...every time i use the damn apple weather app i am reminded how much i miss dark sky and my contempt is rekindled. makes me wonder how often this sort of tragedy happens.

zombiwoof2• 2 years ago

100000%

No excuse to not just buy Dark Sky and let them continue unburdened by corporate politics

lagniappe• 2 years ago

I used to use darksky a lot, because it reminded me of Back To The Future 2 when it'd do the "done raining in 5 mins". It's a stupid request, but if other services could figure this out along with a cute UI like darksky, I'd be your best friend. Weather sites can have the best info, but if the UI is not good then its much harder to draw conclusions from the stats.

starmftronajoll• 2 years ago

After the shutdown of Dark Sky, I switched to Carrot, which added a layout that mimics Dark Sky's design (the layout option is called "Anubis" in the Carrot app). I've found it to be a largely seamless replacement.

flkiwi5• 2 years ago

Agree, though there's still something about Carrot's underlying design language that is less subtle and refined. It's a very, very minor complaint given the effort Carrot clearly made (and their evident appreciation for a competitor that did things better for many users' preferences), but there's some weird information processing lag I still experience with Carrot because I'm fighting the UI even though it looks almost identical to DS. In the end, I actually enjoy the experience because (a) it's so minor and (b) it gives me an opportunity to play with how my own brain perceives the universe. So that's fun.

trts• 2 years ago

I actually feel Apple did a decent job gobbling it up and incorporating some of the best features into their native weather app.

Merry Sky is a good homage but I've never evaluated it much for accuracy: https://merrysky.net/forecast/new%20york/us

culi2• 2 years ago

I agree. I couldn't find anything in the OP post that the Apple weather app doesn't currently do and, imo, do in a much more refined way

metabagel7• 2 years ago

I became exasperated with the unreliability of the Apple Weather app. It gave embarrassingly wrong predictions on a frequent basis. Dark Sky was amazing. I resent Apple for killing that very accurate and useful app.

bradboimler• 2 years ago

It screwed Android users over though, no?

metabagel7• 2 years ago

I think the most important feature is accuracy. Maybe, Apple Weather is more accurate for other regions, but by my observation it is absolutely not accurate in regards to predicting rain where I live in Southern California. And we don’t even get that much rain.

mh-4• 2 years ago

It's completely inaccurate with regards to "is it raining right now" in San Diego County. Given that, it's predictions are beyond useless.

I didn't live here when Dark Sky was still good, but Dark Sky was incredibly accurate when I lived in the Bay Area.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

(2023)

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115

dang• 2 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263115 - March 2023 (251 comments)

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Been using Merry Sky (https://merrysky.net) quite happily as a replacement mostly for the layout/quick data viz. Mostly accurate/helpful as Dark Sky was, tho some rare data blackouts when it can't pull the data or whatever, but it's back in a few hours

jszymborski• 2 years ago

Second Merry Sky

Stephen3042• 2 years ago

Also check out briefsky. Like merrysky it supports the pirate weather API but it's open source / self hostable (at least I don't see any link to merrysky's source) and it supports several other weather APIs as well. I found switching it to the tomorrow.io API was much more accurate for beach weather.

yokoprime• 2 years ago

Looks cool, but wasn’t available for where I live in Europe, so never got to experience it.

nate• 2 years ago

Tangent maybe. But when I used Dark Sky, I and everyone who asked me about the weather and I'd give them data from Dark Sky were always impressed by my accuracy for knowing when it would rain and stop raining. Now I use Carrot with the AccuWeather(sp) api, and it'll be pouring right on top of me, and Carrot tells me "no rain for the hour". Is this just weather getting harder and harder to predict, or is AccuWeather trash, or anyone else find something that seems as accurate as Dark Sky was?

culi2• 2 years ago

I find the same issues with Apple's weather app. And even Windy's notifications. The only helpful thing is an actual heatmap visualization of rain. That always gives you a lot more context and a better understanding of what's happening and for how long. I actually really love Apple's rain heatmap

techsupporter• 2 years ago

One of the many reasons I pay for Carrot is to get the other, more expensive, data sources. If you do stump up, you get access to the Apple Weather API--what once was Dark Sky--as well as Foreca. I've found both of them to be very accurate based on what Carrot reports.

(For what it's worth, I never used the Dark Sky app directly. I've always consumed it via Carrot or a free API key that Dark Sky used to give out for individual developers.)

wil421• 2 years ago

My former coworker was insufferable about Dark Sky being accurate but I never found that to be the case. Same with his insistence I use Waze to go through random parking lots, only to find our cowokers beat us back from lunch using a sane route but I am digressing.

Where I am big thunderstorms are very common and it can be dry a quarter mile away. It’s a good indicator but I never found Dark Sky, Accuwhatever, or Apple Weather to be accurate with the rain forecast.

damontal• 2 years ago

Seemed like more of a gimmick to me.

Many times it would say something like Rain stopping in 10 minutes. Then 8 minutes later… Rain stopping in 15 minutes. On and on as it steadily rained.

BenFranklin100• 2 years ago

The old Weather Underground weather app is another example of an acquisition destroying superb graphics design. Its clarity, information density, and beauty has yet to be matched.

et-al2• 2 years ago

Weather Line was another beautifully weather app based on Dark Sky I really miss:

https://vimeo.com/364505041

https://kevinclark.ca/work/weatherline/

dmd• 2 years ago

https://weathergraph.app/ is its spiritual successor.

et-al2• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing this! I miss this concise UI so much.

ckolkey• 2 years ago

I've been using flowX for many years, first on android and now on ios. I've found it to be incredibly customisable, and particularly good at visualising incoming weather. Gladly paid for it for years now

https://www.flowx.io/

whalesalad• 2 years ago

I always thought Dark Sky had one of the worst UI's on the planet.

kasperset• 2 years ago

I like this simplistic presentation of Weather Strip https://www.weatherstrip.app/ I think it builds upon this Wetter for iOS app http://wetter.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php

Wetter is more detailed and complicated to read as compared to Weather Strip but I like the information such as CAPE and pressure info.

jcalx• 2 years ago

The Dark Sky blog [1] had a post on their (then-new) app design, and also had many other posts on some details of their weather prediction algorithms and other technical bits. Sadly the blog was deleted after the Apple acquisition, but it is archived on the Wayback Machine. Some good reading!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191210071310/https://blog.dark...

bradgessler2• 2 years ago

The one problem it had, that it still has to this day under Apple's reign, is not being able to tell the difference between clear skies and if the precipitation map tiles are still loading.

moepstar• 2 years ago

if the precipitation map tiles are still loading.

which they seem to do for prolonged periods or won't load at all, no matter the hardware and internet connection (tested on: iPhone 8+, iPhone SE 2020, iPhone 15 Pro - makes no difference)

Most infuriating thing they do (while we're at it): load everything except the area i'm interested in. I can't even...

bradgessler2• 2 years ago

Yeah. Given how many iPhones are deployed into the world, I wonder how many people looked at that data visualization and thought, "Clear skies! I guess I'll continue..." and instead headed directly into inclement weather.

bobbylarrybobby• 2 years ago

Not quite as feature-rich, but for a similar “shape-based” UI, Weather Strip is fantastic. It provides, IMO, an even clearer picture of the weather than dark sky did.

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

Is DarkSky not an actual weather app?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35268026

Meteorologists seemed to feel that Dark Sky was a graphics processing tool, not a weather app.

---

  “Any weather forecast beyond a couple of hours ... depend on supercomputer models that work according to the laws of physics ... But when we talk about Dark Sky, all it was doing was taking the visual input of the radar and extrapolating what was going to happen over the next couple of hours.”

https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/dark-sky-weather-app-ap...

georgehotelling• 2 years ago

Every time I looked at the animated weather app, I would see the animation start in the past where clouds moved and grew and shrank naturally. As soon as it passed the present moment, the clouds would become fixed shapes and continue on whatever their current vector is. In the visualization there was no attempt to model clouds growing and shrinking. The clouds would suddenly start skidding across the screen.

I've read that is what the underlying precipitation "models" did as well, but obviously can't confirm.

counters3• 2 years ago

Yes; they basically just extrapolated from these "rain blobs" on the visualization as the short-term forecast they provided to users. There are some long-since wiped blog posts that provide a bit more context on how they do a little bit of statistical processing of the general forecast model output to help with they "hyper-localization," but the reality is that it was terribly unsophisticated relatively to what is traditionally done in meteorology.

The rain nowcasting feature that Dark Sky popularized is now table stakes in any consumer weather app. There's little value in making these types of forecasts any more complex (e.g. using AI or other contemporary techniques) because they still have egregious and noticeable failure modes. And it's so trivial to make this type of forecast that there is open source software you can easily run to do it [1].

[1] https://pysteps.github.io/

imp0cat• 2 years ago

Look at windy.com, their cloud prediction works pretty much the same.

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

How does that make it "not a weather app"? This is just dumb gatekeeping.

dwaite5• 2 years ago

I imagine because it operated counter to basic meteorological theory.

The difference is that 15 minute rain forecasts don't need that to be usefully accurate.

A model of equivalent simplicity would be about as accurate as the farmer's almanac for a 10 day forecast.

hampelm• 2 years ago

Unlike the meteorologists, darksky actually worked and would tell you when it was about to rain

Flop7331• 2 years ago

Except it did that and communicated about it better than any other "weather app"

i80and2• 2 years ago

If that's all it took for Dark Sky on the backend to do what it did, then there's even less excuse for the lack of a good replacement in 2024.

dooglius• 2 years ago

Is predicting beyond a couple hours all that useful/important?

shagie6• 2 years ago

For the eclipse, I was using hyperlocal forecasts for the next day (and next two) for planning for which direction to go, where to stay, and where to head the next day.

The morning of the eclipse it was a question of "this town or that town or that other town at this time."

This may be an edge case, but there are certainly times where prediction for a certain time 24h or 48h in advance is useful.

bunderbunder• 2 years ago

Seems like an strawman comparison to me?

Dark Sky's hyper-local weather predictions weren't based on projecting hours into the future. They were based on very small-scale extrapolation and interpolation.

The meteorologists with their supercomputers aren't, to the best of my knowledge, even trying to do that. And Dark Sky wasn't trying to compete with their models, either. For that kind of long-term forecasting, it was simply passing along the forecasts that meteorological services used those models to produce.

cameldrv• 2 years ago

On a related note, I had to stop using the Apple weather app because it doesn’t even get the current temperature right at my house. Right now, Apple weather is saying it’s 61 degrees and Weather Underground is saying 72.

metabagel7• 2 years ago

Exactly. It’s junk. It can’t even accurately report the current weather.

ricardobayes• 2 years ago

I have never used Dark Sky, although I have to say the Apple Weather app is one of the best I've seen so far (for my area). It works really well and it can often tell weather changes down to the minute.

jgrahamc• 2 years ago

I miss Dark Sky a lot and Apple totally screwed it up. I sponsor the Pirate Weather (https://pirateweather.net/) project which duplicates the Dark Sky API and used it to make my own display: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/04/a-personal-weather-picture-usin...

Pirate Weather is the backend for the Dark Sky-like Merry Sky: https://merrysky.net/

webel0• 2 years ago

Are there any comparisons of weather apps by area? For example, "for the San Francisco bay area, apple weather is most accurate on rain. But for NYC accuweather is better." I suppose you ought to be comparing weather APIs rather than apps but it would be most usable if you just knew which app to download.

smkelly• 2 years ago

Not really apps, but here's a tool that can do it by forecast data source: https://www.forecastadvisor.com

g_sch2• 2 years ago

The feature I miss most about Dark Sky was that it allowed you to visualize changes in dew point throughout the day.

Where I live (US East Coast), the weather can feel dramatically different depending on the humidity. Relative Humidity has always felt to me like a poor way of measuring how humid the weather will feel. For example, 50% RH at 84ºF will feel lightly humid and generally pleasant, whereas 50% RH at at 97ºF will feel like a swamp. The dew points at those respective points - 63ºF and 75ºF - do a much better job at immediately conveying how humid the air will feel.

Dark Sky used to show hourly dew point graphs that you could browse throughout the week and see when the humidity would break (or return). Apple Weather does show you the dew point, but only when you select a point on the RH graph. So to track the dew point over the coming week, you basically need to drag your finger over each day's graph and observe the changing numbers.

I think this is probably just due to the lack of general awareness about how dew point is a more elegant shorthand for "absolute humidity" than any other weather metric currently in use. I hope there will be more of us in the future!

jachee2• 2 years ago

Relative Humidity is directly tied to the dew point. Take a look back at the humidity forecast and look right under the humidity percentage. The dew point is there. If you tap a point in the future on the graph of forecast changes, the dew point is also registered there.

g_sch2• 2 years ago

Yes, but what I'd really like to see is a visual graph of the dew point over the course of a day. The graph currently only shows RH%, and the only way to see how the dew point will change over the course of a day is to drag your finger over the RH% graph and watch the dew point number change.

Leftium8• 2 years ago

- Relative humidity is also directly tied to the current temperature. (Warmer air can hold more moisture.)

- The dew point is independent from the temperature, so it is effectively a measure of "absolute humidity."

- While both measurements have their advantages, I find dew point a better indicator of the "mugginess." Also it is easier to estimate the relative humidity given the dew point vs. estimate the dew point given the relative humidity.

- You can compare both here: https://weather-sense.leftium.com (humidity plot disabled, but the value can be checked by hovering.)

jmbwell• 2 years ago

Here in Houston as well, dew point is as important as temperature and %PoP. Apple Weather suffices for now but I hope it gets richer with the various types of data that are of greater relevance in different regions.

password4321• 2 years ago

Good idea! I just added humidity to my home screen widget using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cloud3squa...

travisluis• 2 years ago

I too miss the dew point feature. The best replacement for Dark Sky I've found is this 10-day view of Weather Underground that's unfortunately only available on their website—I just bookmark the website on my phone home screen. https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/austin/30.27,-97...

ck22• 2 years ago

They are basically collapsing the weather gov plots into a single graph or two

(weather gov data is open/free, you can pull it down and plot anyway you want)

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...

havaloc• 2 years ago

https://www.windy.com/-Menu/menu?dewpoint

Windy.com to the rescue for dewpoint lovers.

Izkata2• 2 years ago

that's unfortunately only available on their website

A very old version of their Android app had that view as a 3-day widget for the home screen. Right after it was bought they did a major upgrade and removed a ton of functionality, that widget included.

cyberpunk• 2 years ago

Carrot weather has dewpoint graphs (depending on source used).

Leftium8• 2 years ago

https://weather-sense.leftium.com

My web app plots hourly dew point for the next 24 hours, next 7 days, and past 2 days. (Still WIP.)

Inspired by https://merrysky.net (can also plot dew point), which was inspired by Dark Sky.

simlevesque3• 2 years ago

I like your app. I'm planning a trip next week and it was so easy to see the next few days.

ProxCoques2• 2 years ago

Excellent app! And I'm sure I'm not the only one to congratulate you in showing past weather - a so obviously useful feature that 99% of all weather apps never have.

js2• 2 years ago

The NWS has local forecast graphs with dew point, temp, heat index, etc, but they are a pain to get to.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.7482&lon=-7...

1. Go to https://www.weather.gov/

2. Put your zip code into the Local forecast box.

3. Click the Hourly Weather Forecast graph on the right side.

4. Bookmark it.

seoulbigchris3• 2 years ago

This is great! I live in Sacheon, and am now making this my go-to weather app.

deanishe• 2 years ago

Cool. How do I switch it to standard units?

EDIT: NVM, found it. You tap the temperature.

EDIT 2: It really ought to remember the units. 95% of the planet doesn't ever want to see Fahrenheit.

GrayShade• 2 years ago

Pretty nice app, I just have a small bug report: my location has a space in it, and it shows up as %20.

bsimpson• 2 years ago

I'm moving to NYC tomorrow, after spending my entire life on the West Coast.

Thanks for teaching me about dew point (and to the commenters below you for letting me know there's a free Dark Sky clone - merrysky.net - and a dew point graph on Weather Underground)!

MollyRealized• 2 years ago

I am completely with you.

For me, I've written myself a Google Apps script - to be more accurate, AI did, but with my interaction - that e-mails a "humidity forecast" as to how wet the next six days are going to feel to me in a simple way. I don't know who came up with the categories I've placed them in - it seemed to be common weather information.

https://github.com/mollyrealized/humid-fcast/blob/main/Code....

jp191919• 2 years ago

I used to love Dark Sky on android. Finally settled on a using a combination of Breezy Weather and Flowx

NelsonMinar• 2 years ago

I find it wild that no one has fully replaced Dark Sky, ideally with an outright clone. Both the visualization and the unique "it's about to rain where you are" prediction system. I've tried a lot of clones of the latter and none work nearly as well.

These days I go to windy.com for my weather nerd needs but it's quite different from Dark Sky.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

The default weather app on my Samsung phone looks an awful lot like Apple's default weather app, but it has a line graph below the hourly temperatures.

I check it a couple times a day, and it's good enough for my needs. My bar's pretty low, though. The weather is rather unpredictable where I live; IME there's really no such thing as an accurate hourly forecast more than ~12 hours out. On Sunday night, today's forecast showed heavy rain and thunderstorms. Currently, it's 85 and there isn't a cloud in the sky. No amount of good dataviz can make up for that.

If you lived somewhere where you might take weather forecast accuracy for granted, I can see why you'd hate Samsung's app. It does the 24-hour hourly forecast and the 10-day daily summary just fine, but that's it. It'll show you current air quality and humidity, but no forecast data for those. Also, if you tap anything to see more details, it just launches an AccuWeather web page.

Stephen3042• 2 years ago

I've been using briefsky which is similar to merrysky but open source. Both use pirate weather which is a recreation of the dark sky API. It's not as accurate (and I sometimes also switch briefsky to the tomorrow.io API) but it gives me that familiar UI and fills the role well enough for now.

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

it is so important that somebody stands up to apple fanboization and points out that their UI design is mediocre at best.

ck22• 2 years ago

I actually like the weather gov format, it's how my brain works

put your lat/lon on the end

(google HQ) https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...

(amazon HQ) https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...

The data is open/free, you can pull down the raw data and make it look however you want.

I just wish there was an easy website to get Google's new AI weather which supposedly is far more accurate (only on certain android builds?)

renewiltord• 2 years ago

I don't get it. What is the irreplaceable part? You're all software engineers. Why don't you just write the software you're missing?

I'd do it but I know I don't care about the weather like this. I just ask my voice assistant in broad terms. So I would suck at building it. But you guys all care. Why is it non replicable?

nirav72• 2 years ago

Dark Sky was incredible. I could time my out door activity like going for a run or do yard work based on its real time rain alerts down to the minute or two. Haven't found anything that accurate for forecasting. I was really hoping Apple would've merged some of that into their own IOS weather app. But it never happened.

antisthenes• 2 years ago

So why not replicate it?

Dark Sky is basically just fancy visualization for csv/json data from a weather API.

fkyoureadthedoc2• 2 years ago

To challenge Dark Sky they have to beat nostalgia, not reality. The default weather app is probably good enough for most people.

joshe• 2 years ago

I dearly wish Apple would just publish Dark Sky again. Let the Weather app be whatever super clean design hero you want, just give us back this perfect information dense weather app to use day to day.

There have to be dozens of devs in apple who would love to be on the 1-2 person team it would take to maintain it. (It was a 2 person startup for years, don't come at me with how hard stuff is.) It could even be a reward for good service, "ok you successfully mucked around with weird EU privacy law in the health app for 2 years, instead of a sabbatical for therapy how about you get to work on Dark Sky for a year?"

voidfunc• 2 years ago

Somewhere in Cupertino an Apple UX engineer is furrowing their brow at you.

How dare you want information!

dwaite5• 2 years ago

What good would that be without the information backing it? (The DarkSky API server)

And if that information does still exist in the (public) Apple Weather API, why hasn't anyone (not just some Apple Engineer) just created an app with the views people care about?

zombiwoof2• 2 years ago

Here me out: Dark Sky amazingness is why we need to get rid of these tech monopolies

None of this amazing innovation comes from big companies

Now it’s swallowed up, resting and vesting

akeck• 2 years ago

My "favorite" behavior on the new post-DarkSky Weather app is that each of the phones in the house give different info re the weather directly outside. The worst is my child's phone which has its language set to Mandarin (the only substantive difference between their phone and our phones). Their Weather app is usually way off from our phones. None of the phones match the info given by NWS.

ak217• 2 years ago

I've never used Dark Sky, but the most innovative weather app/site I've used is definitely Weather Underground. Their radar and 10-day view are second to none.

It does sound like Dark Sky had one useful feature that has no match - analyzing weather radar and sending personalized rain alert push notifications based on your location. That's pretty awesome.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

This is why I have said recently and have gotten massive downvotes: do not sell your company and "exit". The world will become a much better place if you do not plan for an exit, but plan to make a better world.

tomaskafka2• 2 years ago

I love data visualization and run https://weathergraph.app - an iOS/Apple watch/mac app that people often praise for getting many weather metrics into one view. Dew point is surprisingly underrated metric that strongly affects how the weather feels like.

It also has a ‘Dark Sky emulation’ mode for everyone who loved the now defunct app.

I use Foreca, which consistently ranks among top 3 services on forecastadvisor.com, and Pirate Weather & Open-Meteo, which are two awesome indie services that access and enrich the best public models.

Here is how it looks like: https://imgur.com/gallery/Rduy7qc

user_7832• 2 years ago

I just installed your app, and it certainly looks nice.

Is there no way to use the app (with free data sources) at your own location? Right now it appears to choose a random demo location. It’s a pity because I don’t use weather apps that much to justify spending money but I appreciate the app nonetheless.

tomaskafka2• 2 years ago

Hi, that’s currently right - I am iterating on this, and I might bring back the free mode with limited customization instead of demo location with everything. Thanks for the feedback!

fiforpg• 2 years ago

Just as the author of this blog, I found Dark Sky UI uniquely concise and informative. I managed to somewhat replace it with not one, but two apps (on Android):

- OpenWeather for a dense, one-page view of short-term upcoming conditions (temperature, precipitation) and the weekly forecast.

- Shadow Weather for extra details: cloud cover, wind directions, etc.

egypturnash• 2 years ago

When Apple killed Dark Sky, I ended up with Weather Strip. It does a really good job of giving me the same amount of information density. Possibly even better - one fairly readable graph combines rain probability, temperature, cloudiness, and estimated inches of rain into a single glance. https://www.weatherstrip.app

dotancohen• 2 years ago

That looks absolutely terrific. Does anybody know an Android equivalent?

eddyg• 2 years ago

There’s also WeatherGraph:

https://weathergraph.app/

chmaynard• 2 years ago

Why is everyone blaming Apple? Your anger should be directed at the authors, who sold their proprietary software and reaped the benefits. This is the dream of most startup entrepreneurs. I'm sure they are quite happy about what happened.

webwielder2• 2 years ago

Why do people care about checking the weather in detail so much? Tomorrow it will probably be like today, unless it does/does not precipitate.

adammarples• 2 years ago

Side note but I've downloaded and tried 10-15 weather apps this week. All I want to do is see the weather for the rest of the day, and then the rest of the week. None of them can really do it. The best ones can give you a few hours of the day (horizontal) and then a couple of days (vertical) (why the format change?). All of them completely waste all of their screen space with useless things like one gigantic temperature icon or just pictures of clouds. Invariably they have all the data you need but it's not considered important enough to put on the screen and you have to scroll.

TobTobXX• 2 years ago

In Switzerland, many people use the government-develpped weather app (MeteoSwiss). It havs very similar visualizations like DarkSky it seems.

They also have a web interface, if you want to check it out, though the app is better: https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/lokalprognose/zuerich/8001...

reportgunner• 2 years ago

I've been using Klara for years, I especially like the detailed daily forecast that shows hourly weather.

A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)

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