![]() In Forecast there is room enough underneath the bar to avoid this being an issue.Īs a heavy Forecast user and lover, I was excited at the prospect of a native app with the same functionality. In Dark Sky, it's impossible to manipulate this slider without your thumb obscuring the indicator's position. This is exacerbated by both the indeterminate time labelling and the physical position of the bar. In addition, when dragging to animate the radar data, Dark Sky gives no indication of the current time making it difficult to work out exactly how the image above relates to the present conditions outside. Dark Sky fixes this but adds fresh confusion by positioning the labels exactly bisecting the indicators. Well wouldn't you know, that's exactly how Forecast presents this information:įorecast makes a misstep here too, choosing to use an odd 40 minute scale. That would also allow the user to connect this secondary information with any upcoming storm because they’d be on the screen at the same time. ![]() They’d have been better off taking a cue from Apple’s weather app and having this text fill just the top portion of the first screen when tapped. ![]() Drang suggests that the detailed secondary weather information revealed by tapping on the black circle in Dark Sky could be more concisely presented elsewhere: One in particular is relevant to this post – Dr. Drang mostly defends Dark Sky in his blog post about it, but does have some criticisms, all of which I agree with. To me, this makes a lot more sense than the line-in-space of Dark Sky.ĭr. Only Weather Line has ever really pulled off this style of temperature change representation well and the desire to include it in Dark Sky seems to have prompted the decision to move the next 24 hour information on to a second screen of its own.įorecast includes this temperature information on the precipitation bar itself. The most vital part of Dark Sky, the launch screen, is fine, but a quick look at Forecast's launch screen shows you things could be better:Īs can be seen to the right, when swiping between the two screens the transition animation and lack of common vertical alignment breaks any visual connection between the two.Īs Jared notes above, the temperature line is even harder to parse. These are hardly insurmountable issues, but they are surprising given that the Dark Sky team launched a fully featured multi-platform weather web app almost a year ago (that clearly informed the Dark Sky update) that is considerably better designed and laid out: Forecast.io. This is a rather damning indictment for a weather app. This snippet hints at the main problem with the app – the difficulty in parsing the visual information, especially where graphs and scales are involved. It’s just a line meandering through negative space. On the second panel, the 24 hour temperature graph doesn’t have any bounding guides or axes to give the graph meaning. Personally, I think Jared Sinclair's critique is broadly accurate, particularly his thoughts on the lack of axes on the second screen: But the new design isn't quite as lovely as it could've been and there have been a number of blog posts analysing its issues. The update was designed to increase the app's scope from its short-term rain-predicting accessory role to fully fledged Main Weather App. ![]()
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