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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Dark Sky was okay. As detailed here, it does a great job of centering on the actual user needs of weather app users.

Unfortunately, it also demonstrated that which users you focus on matters a lot.

Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’

You know, northern Californians.

It was a poor fit for people whose weather landscape includes frequent storms; snowfall; temperature ranges that go down below freezing (seriously - dark sky’s temperature graphs never marked freezing temperatures for some reason); multiple types of precipitation; etc.

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Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW, where the main concerns are just how rainy it will be that day, and the approximate high temperatures coming up. Nothing accurately forecasts (here) whether it will be freezing or whether precipitation will be snow/slush/hail/rain, but other apps like Apple's are absolutely horrific at forecasting precipitation even a few hours out. Stuff like showing 30% chance of rain in 1 hour, clear the rest of the day, when it just rains the entire day and the "forecast" continually shows that it will stop raining in 30 minutes.

> Dark Sky is great at answering the weather questions of people who live in places where rain showers are short lasting; where temperatures range from ‘cool’ to ‘hot’; and where storms are infrequent, special events. Basically people whose interaction with the weather hinges on ‘do I need a jacket?’

> Disagree. Dark Sky was fantastic in the PNW

I think you're actually in complete agreement with OP

Right? ‘It’s not only for Northern California! It works fine up as far as Seattle!’ is not exactly a refutation of my (slightly hyperbolically stated) thesis that Dark Sky’s human friendliness is not as global as people seem to think.

Sure, if you translate that to "somewhere with blizzards" and ignore that it's nonsense as-is.

When does the temperature drop to freezing and negative windchill in PNW like OP mentioned were use cases not designed into the app as it is not of the target audience with areas of mild weather.

I live in the mountains in Colorado and DarkSky was by far the best UX for viewing upcoming weather. The way they presented projected hourly snowfall was especially good, as was the projected snowfall by day.

With Apple Weather, you get a snow icon and a percentage for future days. For DarkSky it was an actual projected snowfall amounts, which is so much more useful. Are we expecting 2 inches? Or 20?

On a daily basis, Dark Sky had a great graph of hourly projections. Apple Weather has a bar chart with no numbers unless you hover on each bar, and it will project 8 hours of snow in the hourly view but then the bar chart only shows a bar on one hour.

I said it was okay. Just don’t feel like it had the most incredible human-centric weather UI that is often touted for it.

When I evaluated it, my main concerns were things like ‘am I gonna have to dig the car out in the morning?’ and ‘is that thunderstorm heading right for me or just to one side?’ - and those were not things I felt Dark Sky did particularly well. The old weatherspark visualizations used to be much better, but they seem to have vanished.

Which is fine! Tools can be great for some things and not others! I just find it surprising that it is touted as having hot weather presentation ‘right’. I’m still waiting for better.

Try tapping on the icon in Apple Weather to see a graph of various elements.

I dunno, I live in Washington, DC, which has many of those properties (snow, freezing temperatures, heavy thunderstorms in the summer), and knowing which ten-minute window in the next hour was the least likely to get me soaked if I wanted to pop out for coffee was still incredibly useful, and I have yet to find a satisfactory replacement. Certainly there were some days when the weather was shit regardless and there wasn't a good opening, but no app is going to remedy that.

I lived in both Florida and Massachusetts, using DarkSky was amazing in both climates. I think your geographical bias is more telling than your app usage.

Author here -- Yeah the "accuracy" of the weather I think ultimately can be debated. I think "accuracy" could very specific to your geographic area.

Plus, Dark Sky could have switched up their data feeds or algorithms to improve this. But it's difficult to teach their design approach

I disagree. I'm a photographer in Minnesota and getting notified when rain was going to start and stop was really handy on wedding days. I also had it set to let me know if the next day was going to be windy so I could possibly postpone shoots.

Yes, rain shower timing is Dark Sky’s greatest utility.

I just found it surprising that ‘rain will turn to ice starting at 7pm’ was not also a usecase Dark Sky gave as much attention to.

It was great in the UK, although it doesn’t freeze or storm too much here either.

I live in Montreal and I loved Dark Sky. So I'll disagree.

UK here where we have all the weather all the time. I also disagree.

I used to think the UK had all the weather too. Then I moved to New England, which still doesn’t get all the weather, but compared to the UK, feels like the weather is turned up to 11.

What the UK has is changeable weather, which is, as I say, what dark sky excels at helping you with (‘will I need me brolly? Or will it blow away?’)

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