alt Hacker NewsEulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)
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Dark Sky was a marvel, and when it first came out, its ability to say rain will start where you are in 2-3 minutes was a marvel.
The information design argument is 100% valid, but I also marvel that, having bought the company, Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate. I don't know whether Apple's privacy focus prevents them making the same precise predictions, or if there is some other reason they don't, but it's sad that in 2025 we don't have the same level of performance as we did twelve years ago.
The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time, though it’s still not a perfect replacement.
Scrolling through the Dark Sky screenshots, I can recognize many of the same things now incorporated with Apple’s. And Apple does offer location specific notifications of rain which I find to be pretty accurate, about as accurate as Dark Sky.
There’s largely a perception problem with Apple. People loved Dark Sky as an independent small app that worked well, before Apple took it and destroyed it. Now, even if Apple incorporated all of the same data and features, it still wouldn’t give that same spark of joy people had.
Among all the destruction Apple has wrought when they killed DarkSky, they also failed to bring back the weather history feature. You could go back decades and see the weather anytime, anywhere. I miss it so.
A really good Android open source alternative is Breezy Weather: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather
Looking at the screenshots, Dark Sky does something bad that I think most other weather apps do badly as well.
Specifically: each day has a range (low and high) but it's not clear whether the low is for the morning or evening, and they could be vastly different. You could have 10-15 one day then 0-10 the next day, and think "Ok, I'll go out tonight and bring a jacket but no hat since the lowest it'll get today is 10 and whoops, actually it's freezing by the time dinner's over.
There are so many ways apps could do this better. Like showing a vertical line graph rather than discrete bars, with the lows inbetween days. Or if you want to keep the bars, make them angled, so the low is closer to the morning/night it's associated with. Or even show 3 temperatures, not just two! (one being the low for the previous or next day or whatever)
To those who are interested in viewing the “shape” of weather data (and who are using an apple device), I cannot recommend https://www.weatherstrip.app enough. I think its visualization is even superior to Dark Sky’s, mostly by virtue of being more compact without losing anything.
Yes Dark Sky had the best UI of any weather app I have used.
I now use Weathergraph which does it differently but I would go back to Dark Sky (and pay for it) in a flash.
It shows the correct things and on a phone understands that showing the temperatures across the screen is useless as if I go out I want to know what the weather is like when I might make the journey back in 8+ hours time. I might not care what the weather is in 4 hours time as I will be inside.
After darksky was shutdown I ended up using, https://www.yr.no/en . I've not seen it recommended here before and thought someone might enjoy it
I am surprised no one mentioned Carrot as a replacement! I have been using it for years. they don't have their own source of data, they are mostly a good UI, and you need to select a data source like Apple Weather or others.
Note: Not related to the light-pollution organization https://darksky.org/
Aple software has gotten so much worse over the past few years. I'm back on Android.
I suggest Weawow, which has both Android and iOS apps. Ad free.
I enjoyed this write-up on UI design and Visualization topic.
The table of user "context and situation" is a great document. You can easily envision authoring this table and scrolling to the right of your initial columns (A,B) to see further into the design process,
A) "When I hear about a storm, I want to prepare my loved ones, my property, etc.
B) Storm forecast ... : - Where is the storm right now and is it heading my direction?
[...]
N) _Show the storm front using _directional arrows_ ... (compact and replaces need for animation)_
The last section concludes in praise of the design and includes this: _"rigorously iterated on data visualization design". I wish we would have seen evidence of this, principally in the form of older screen shots of the design.
I think design iteration is the difference between mere good design and good products, and legendary product design.
Personally, I'd love to see a write up of my favorite whipping post, Transit App. Oh boy did that app go down hill, and with such great potential.
I miss Dark Sky for its impressive "local weather at a glance" accuracy and UX -- but Windy.app is pretty great too, with more details than DS ever had. They're maybe slightly complementary, given Windy.app is more like "prosumer" weather forecasting for nautical purposes, but I highly recommend it.
It's amazing to me that nobody has been able to match their UX (Apple in particular - how did they fumble the acquisition so badly?). The Weather Channel by most accounts has the best model but one of the worst websites of all time. live.xweather.com (formerly Aeris) is kind of close, but is basically an ad for their API/commercial subscriptions and not really built for day-to-day use. Some of the open source clones have the UI 80% of the way there but their forecasts aren't as accurate.
I've settled on using the built-in Android weather app, but it pales in comparison to Dark Sky, in every respect.
One of the things that made Dark Sky so great was its simplicity and focus. Apple Weather has added many of DS’s features over the past few years, but it’s so much more busy and dense with information. This is a problem that Carrot Weather and many of the other apps mentioned in the comments here also have. There was something very special about that app, and I really do miss it (also Apollo, Google Reader, Gaia GPS, and all the other apps that were canceled or turned into bloated monstrosities before their time).
> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands.
So true.
Open Meteo supports 28 different WMO weather condition codes[1]. Most weather apps only support half as many. (Just "rain" instead of light/moderate/heavy rain.)
Showing all 28 is less helpful because of the noise. More useful just to show it might rain for a period of several hours vs oscillating between light rain and heavy rain. The light vs heavy precision wasn't worth it when there was high uncertainty whether it would even rain at all.
So https://weather-sense.leftium.com consolidates hours with similar weather conditions into a single segment by default. You can click on the weather icons at the left of the plots to toggle the original unconsolidated view.
I was a big fan, the original version was called forecast.io.
It was a rare example at the time when it was _the_ webapp better than any existing 'native' apps.
fwiw, on iOS, I like using WeatherGraph: https://weathergraph.app/
The developer is very responsive, lots of UI customization (both app and widgets) is possible, and pricing is reasonable.
When I’m riding my bike, I use the weather.gov weather graphs. It took me a little bit to read it at a glance, but it’s all the information for the next couple days in graph form. (2 more days a click away) They have the whole week summary on the main forecast page, but I find the graph really useful.
Eg;
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3773&lon=-7...
Data visualization. This very phrase brought to mind Tableau. Their core principle was data visualization and then they were acquired by Salesforce and became enterprise software. A call to a eulogy for dear Tableau.
For anyone mourning Dark Sky, I make Weathergraph - visual weather app, which has the Dark Sky-like vertical view as an optional data layout.
It's shown in the middle screenshot at https://weathergraph.app (on desktop, mobile users can check https://impresskit.net/image-download/9161183f-e118-4c75-8f8... )
We took a lot of inspiration from darksky and this post when designing the forecast tab in the Precip (YC W24) app. The app started out just as historical weather, but we recently added forecasts if you want to check it out. https://precip.ai
I’m surprised how many places in the world measure rain in percentage chance. Must be a metropolitan concept. Here in Denmark, weather reports estimate mm/hr - the amount of rain. Maybe it’s our agricultural inheritance?
I miss it too, so I created a web based weather app directly inspired by Dark Sky: https://github.com/hbmartin/open-sun
Notable weather iOS app that I use or have used in the past are:
Wetter: http://plot.micw.org/apps/wetter/index.php
weatherstrip : https://www.weatherstrip.app
For weather data and amazing visualizations see https://weatherspark.com/
Check out their compare feature. Brilliant.
Eg: Seattle vs London https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/913~45062/Comparison-of-t...
(Not affiliated. Just an admirer.)
I still miss Dark Sky, and years later find myself instinctively typing "darksky" into my phone to check weather. Nothing is coming closer...
it always felt to me like the major innovation behind darksky was the clever exploitation of newly broadly available precision gps. prior to darksky, i'd look at the radar picture on my smartphone and the pin where i was to try and figure out when it would start raining, darksky seemed to just package this really nicely with visualizations and notifications.
(and yes, the visualizations were beautiful, but the real key was being able to see exactly where one was with respect to the radar picture and to be able to use already existing forward predictions of the radar picture in conjunction with precise gps to generate timeseries/events.)
People are guaranteed to be opinionated about weather apps. I personally use Meteogram (on android). There you see graphs of every weather related quantity you want on a single widget. That in combination with ventusky gives me everything I need.
Can someone explain why the main screen in iOS weather, below the current temperature, shows the high temperature to the left of the low temperature?
In all other places in the app, the low is to the left of high.
It wasn’t as much focused on high level information visualization as Dark Sky, but I also still miss the original Wunderground and its precipitation prediction cones and radar features that were accurate down to the second back before it was acquired by the weather channel, where it went to die of neglect.
This topic raises an issue I’ve had in mind for a while, companies are not realizing their true value when they sell out to some exit, as is evident by the fact that the companies Andy what they created end up being taken out behind the shed. If a competitor is willing to pay a certain amount without extreme pain to the point of convulsion or you don’t get air tight contract that prevents killing off the service/product without it remitting back to the founders or being made open source, you are being low-balled.
Taking the Wunderground example, those folks would have ended up owning the weather channel and probably buying or merging with Dark Sky and being the data provider to Apple instead of the Weather Channel characters (in case you don’t know about that entity) owning and killing off their baby.
I just always use the excellent 10-day forecast tab on wunderground
Apple should have just used that app itself, rather than trying to build whatever that they have right now.
Dark Sky, my love <3
I really like the primary graph in https://mercuryweather.app/
So what happened with previous customers who (I'm presuming) paid for the app? Did their app keep running or were they given a refund? I am guessing it used publicly available weather data, but even then, if the server names changed (and support was ended), wouldn't the app quit working?
What drives me crazy is Apple redesigned their weather app not so long after acquiring dark sky. I was anticipating a polished, updated version of Dark Sky's UI. Instead we have the current design, which is quite frankly terrible.
yeah, nothing hits like dark sky hit
Previous discussions (and submissions by OP):
Rain radar is something I'm always looking at online, it's easy to fast forward from an hour back and see whats about to hit you.
I think that would make a great single purpose mobile app - automatically knows where the sources of information are and shows you the rain - where it was, and where it is going.
Clearly the author didn't "obsess over how people would actually use" the gallery function on his web page
Look at image. Scroll down to find the next image button. Scroll back up to look at image. On desktop
Apple has never been interested in his ability. It's all about having a certain aesthetic that is uniquely apple. That's about it.
I knew so many people that used Dark Sky before Apple bought it...
I thought we lived in the age of infinite AI software and you could just ask for a Dark Sky clone.
Weather APIs are pretty open. What's stopping you?
Oh the irony.
A website dedicated to data visualization and it's totally broken on Desktop Firefox. If they had just created a straightforward article, it would be perfectly legible, but all the flashy-flash just makes it unintelligible.
See also:
Polaroid
Pebble
Palm
Oldsmobile
Tower Records
Borders
Pan Am
Oh how I miss DarkSky, and accuracy in weather apps in general. I have no idea if it is AI or just enshitification, but wow, local temps are just always way off with Apple Weather and most other apps. This is important to me because I live in my van and I am talking about these apps being off 5 to 10 degrees. The only one that comes close is Accuweather but their interface is horrific. And forget about the widgets...just show me the highs and lows for the week and quit changing the layout like you think i know what I want, because you do not.
Fortunately someone recreated a clone at https://merrysky.net, which was featured [1] on HN some time ago.
I've used it daily since.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191