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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

And the clock icon never shows the correct time. It seems like the calendar app is a hack to get it to work right.

I used to own an iPhone 3G and was pretty mad that the calendar icon changed day to day but the weather icon always showed 23 degrees C, sunny. So very frustrating, especially in winter when it's -35 and windy.

I now run Android and have Beautiful Widgets showing me the correct weather. :)

One is always predictable and one requires you to check for new information before you display it. The concern was definitely battery life & update frequency, so they just left it as a static icon.

The weather widget in iOS 5 is a better compromise, it just quickly grabs the weather info when you start pulling down the notification drawer.

Your anecdote reminds me of when I think iOS4 or thereabout came out.

A friend was going nuts going OMG OMG THE WEATHER APP UPDATES LIVE NOW. It turns out it just happened to be 73 or whatever degrees out at the time after he updated.

For these small things like weather updates I agree that apple needs to allow developers to update the app icon or whatever with some alert system on the home screen. It wouldn't be overly difficult to implement.

I don't know though. I can see it from apples standpoint; think of the shit storm that would happen when a G rated app showed some x rated stuff on a update. If they want to keep the curated walled garden clean they would have to restrict it like crazy or have updates go through apple inc before approval.

Oh don't get me wrong I'm not saying they need to do this right this instant. But I think a bit of an expansion of the ios notifications to overlay some text over the icon would be a marked improvement over static icons.

If you change the region format from whatever you have to United States, it will however display 73 degrees F and sunny. I don't want to sound like a fanboy but this is some serious attention to detail.

Funny how we consider that using the right units is laudable even if it is showing junk data.

It's not so much 'junk data' because it isn't perceived as data in the first place. It is still a good design decision because someone used to Fahrenheit wouldn't like seeing it was freezing outside, nor someone used to Celsius that it was boiling.

Not true. It is right twice a day. ;)

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