alt Hacker NewsAcme Weather
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Check out zoom.earth, found it recently. They have an app too.
Apparently it's by https://neave.com/ who looks like an indy developer out of london (according to this: https://neave.com/legal/privacy/)
Also check https://earth.nullschool.net/ by https://github.com/cambecc
Looks lovely. I was keen to try this but US and Canada only unfortunately.
Also: subscription fatigue is real. Of course I understand that fetching weather data isn’t free etc. (even though I’m intrigued by their homegrown forecast model) but I’ve already got 10+ subscriptions on iOS and I’m not sure if I’ve got the stomach for another. Apple’s weather app is finally good though since the Dark Sky acquisition.
How about reporting on yesterday's weather? Its hard to plan a walk in the forest today if I dont know how much it rained yesterday.
This team really have been thinking about weather a lot, and it makes me very curious about what they’ve created this time.
It’s that depth of thought and expertise that feels missing from most of the vibe-coded launches we’ve seen recently. I actually wouldn’t mind if Acme had vibe coded parts, but I bet they didn’t.
> It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied. The more we spoke to friends and family, the more we heard that many of them did too. And, of course, we missed those days as a small scrappy shop.
> So let’s try this again…
At this point, I think that this is just going to get bought out by OpenAI.
Won't be totally surprised to see that outcome.
Sweet! Looking forward to the android version. I was slightly bitter when apple yanked the website.
> Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app.
I will never forgive them for selling out to Apple.
Dark sky was the greatest weather app I've ever used, it had features such as considering the pressure of the atmosphere when predicting rain using crowd sourced phones, and it was the only app I've ever used that was as accurate as it was during a time when my job relied on quickly leaving the office and running across town multiple times a day.
it was sad watching the API get killed off but even worse was that a lot of the features that dark sky had never really made it into Apple weather, and the rain predictions at Apple Weather had were never as accurate as dark sky. There were several times where it was actively raining and Apple weather never even knew. Dark sky always knew.
Nope nope nope fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me, I'm not touching this with 39 1/2 foot pole.
Is there really that much money in making a weather app where you can quit your job at apple and do that?
I have always had a ton of respect for the Dark Sky devs. I love the work that goes into designing interfaces that make sense of complex datasets intuitively, and I feel like Dark Sky was a textbook example. I’m genuinely really excited to try this out.
Ha, this looks like someone took mine and got a real designer to polish it.
I used to use DarkSky for the "history data" for my platform. Querying weather for certain points in the past at certain locations. DarkSky was great for that until they were bought by Apple. Now I am using VisualCrossing for historical data. Hope Acme plans to do historical data too. But if it is US only then it is a no-go anyway.
Smells heavily like the Wunderlist approach, just re-do and re-sell the same thing over and over.
I can't download it, as it appears to be US only. Based on the screenshots, without 'feels like' support throughout the forecast (not just for current conditions) it wouldn't be useful where I live.
Time for everyone who has posted lamenting how Dark Sky was better (that's me!) to put our money where our mouth is.
If a weather app is going to be truly useful, it usually needs a lot of permissions, like access to your location all the time, notifications, etc., and I don’t feel comfortable giving a proprietary app that kind of access, especially when there are great FOSS alternatives.
I am going to chalk this up as another datapoint in the "Apple cannot retain talent" chart. I don't know what the heck they are doing, but everyone they've acquired seems to leave as soon as they can instead of staying.
Interested, but no android app and apparently US only?
Can we update the title?
How are weather apps still relevant, let alone profitable enough to build a company around? This problem has been solved years ago. All the app needs to do is hook up to one or more data providers, and show some stats and pretty graphs. It's essentially a read-only frontend to an API. There are plenty of options to choose from on every platform, including not using an app at all.
The features this ad promotes all seem like solutions to nonexistent problems. "Alternate possible futures" don't give me any more confidence in the forecast—it just shows that it's not reliable, which everyone should know already. "Community reports" just add another layer of uncertainty. How can I trust that someone's report is valid or up-to-date, or that it applies to my area? Maps are nice and visually interesting, but this is not exactly novel. Notifications? No thanks. A weather app "should be fun"? Huge no thanks. Privacy and trust? Why do you collect any data?? Unbelievable.
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Doesn't seem to be available in the EU. Yet another US-only app with US-only weather, I guess, like countless others…
"Obsessing" over your icons and user interface won't make your app useful to people you explicitly do not provide your app to.
We don't care about a Weather app. Very easy to do and there are millions of it. What is missing is good freely accessible data /api for weather info.
Most free one are disappearing and frustratingly in most countries, the weather agency you pay with your tax will not provide it for you.
The site doesn’t make it clear, but it’s not available worldwide. The App Store doesn’t tell you where exactly it is available, but it’s not in the UK.
This surprised me seeing as one of the example images shows Europe, including the south coast of Britain.