Ask HN: Please Review our App: Weatherbike.com

http://www.weatherbike.com

by rsayers • 17 years ago

4 17 17 years ago

stuff4ben• 17 years ago

From your about page, "you really just want to know 3 things: How hot or cold is it? Is it raining? What are the winds like?" Really, what value are you bringing to the table that going outside for 5 seconds can't do? Honestly, I would find another app to write that actually solves a need.

teej2• 17 years ago

How is that going to tell you what the weather is like at the location to which you are commuting?

pedalpete• 17 years ago

how often are you commuting by bike to a location where the weather is significantly different from where you started?

rsayers5• 17 years ago

Honestly this is something I thought of one morning and put most of it together in less than an hour. I find it pretty useful for my own commute and polished it up in hopes it may be helpful to others.

I'm certainly not thinking this will make money or anything.

coglethorpe• 17 years ago

This is an interesting start, but what I really need is to know what it's going to be like during the evening commute.

Possibly you could ad a feature to let a user enter their commute times and get an email, SMS or something to let them know automatically what's up that day.

Then, give them an option to enter their route and add some traffic information -- along with highly localized ads and such, of course.

tudorachim• 17 years ago

With NoScript enabled, this happens:

ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken in IndexController#index

rsayers5• 17 years ago

Thanks, I meant to test that with no JS, slipped my mind.

yan• 17 years ago

I'd like to know the weather in two, four and eight hours also. I can easily see what the weather will be like on my return ride, which is in my opinion, more important.

You can just look outside to see how it is now, but the return ride is always less certain.

jakewolf• 17 years ago

I use weather.gov for forecasts. What would be great is to have alerts if weather falls below or above temp thresholds,forecast for rains increases or other changes which would affect my plans for the day or week.

timmaah• 17 years ago

It is just a rip/copy of http://www.umbrellatoday.com/

Which is a site developed by the Thought Bot folks and used as an example during their rails trainings.

http://www.thoughtbot.com/services/training

rsayers5• 17 years ago

It's actually not, as I've never seen that site until you posted the link, but it is extremely similar.

jdg• 17 years ago

Where are you getting your data from?

rsayers5• 17 years ago

Google weather api

mannicken• 17 years ago

That's a pretty sweet idea but here is a better idea: a site that automatically determines your ZIP (and lets you change it). So basically NOTHING on a page except of:

98023 | 97F | 36 C | "Refresh" button

and maybe an ad or so.

I'm sorry but your design is bad. It has many elements that shouldn't be fucking be there.

In the future, ask yourself: is this bike, which blocks a half of page and makes the essential fucking text less readable, necessary? Is this blue gradient, which slowly gets darker and turns into dark blue right when there is a fucking piece of essential dark text, that necessary? Are we still using Word-fucking-Art to make logos? The text is unreadable.

What the fuck does the "Need to know what your commute has in store?" mean? My first impression: bike + commute + store == a site that gives info on what stuff stores sell as I'm riding my bike on my daily commute!

Also, it's "ZIP code" not "Zip Code" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code) because ZIP is an acronym and we do not capitalize second (or any not first) word in written English. Bothers my eyes.

Verdict: awesome idea but bad design.

I hope this helped.

rsayers5• 17 years ago

Thanks, that was actually extremely helpful.

Ask HN: Please Review our App: Weatherbike.com

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