#hollr

[szmaja]

Searching for (on top) and then finding this little flamey fella (below) for our next app, Hollr.

[kellenblogs]

App Review Warmup: Weather Apps

I use many apps every day, and share them often enough that it seemed like a good idea to have a collection of thoughts to point people to. These posts are going to be editorial pieces, not technical reviews; I enjoy evangelizing what I like, and this will be no different. I’ll usually write about a single app I recommend—there are far too many crappy apps out there to waste time on—but I’m going to start out with a more general topic: weather apps.

Like tip calculators and to-do lists, weather forecasters are a type of app that suffers from a mess of terrible choices. Luckily, there are a few contenders in these spaces that stand out from the pack: Clear, Soulver, Omni Focus, and several others I plan on covering later. I have yet to find a weather app that completely suits my needs, though.

A good weather app should be able to solve several problems: provide an accurate forecast for the morning, afternoon, and evening; inform me of the immediate weather (“Will I need an umbrella, Siri?”,) ideally with push notifications; give me a rough forecast for the upcoming week, with temperature and precipitation; and provide a clean, easy to use interface. Any regular Joe can fetch weather data from the net and puke it onto the screen, but taking advantage of the medium requires a good amount of forethought and creativity.

While there are several apps that have interesting takes on this category, none of them perfectly suit my needs. Dark Sky is the One Bus Away of weather, but like it’s cousin is lacking in some basic information expected from an app in this space. Yahoo! Weather is gorgeous, but stuck in the old paradigm of “derp here’s the forecast derp” instead of doing anything more ambitious. Solar is elegant but short on useful information.

Dark Sky

In Seattle, we are accustomed to reading the weather forecast of “70’s with some clouds” as the downpour of disappointment pitter-patters overhead. Predictions are accurate just often enough to hold out hope for the promised sunshine, but being regularly caught in the rain is too common.

Enter Dark Sky, an app which holds the promise of giving up-to-the-minute weather predictions. It’ll give uncanny forecasts like “rain in 7 minutes, stopping again in 34.” Once I got past my pessimism about how this voodoo could possibly be trusted, Dark Sky became a regular part of my day: I generally check it when there’s a possible chance of rain, and it’s been freakishly accurate for me. They recently added crowdsourcing to their already accurate forecasts, providing even more detail.

Dark Sky’s killer feature, however, is the push notification functionality. The app keeps track of your rough location in the background (don’t worry, battery usage is unaffected and your privacy is not at stake from this) and will send you an alert when rain is about to hit the area. This has saved my ass multiple times, giving me just enough time to duck into a café before the rain came.

For the visually-inclined, they can also present this info as a graph of rain severity over time. The graph even squiggles to reflect the variance in Dark Sky’s prediction.

The app’s radar view leaves a bit to be desired, honestly. Its dark-on-dark color palette may be in line with their brand colors, but makes it difficult to distinguish clear skies from sprinkles. I understand that the staid, old-school green-on-white radar color scheme is butt-ugly, but you’re taking form over function a bridge too far, guys.

I wish the biggest drawback of this app is their choice of colors. While Dark Sky does an excellent job of providing basic short-term information, it doesn’t paint a complete picture of the weather forecast. Basic aspects of how a day feels—humidity and dew point, wind, “feels like…”, UV index, etc.—are completely left out. It seems that the developers went a little too far in their pursuit of simplicity. As the name implies, this app’s real strength is in telling you when it’s going to rain.

In spite of it’s rather limited capabilities, Dark Sky is head and shoulders above the rest in being useful to the user: you’ll never be caught out in the rain again. Dark Sky leverages its incredible information to provide something unimaginable before the smartphone revolution, and that’s why it’s a worthwhile investment.

Yahoo! Weather

Yahoo! takes a much more conservative approach to their app. Given how much this app was touted on its release, you’d expect more than Yahoo! simply fetching information from their various properties and slapping a Helvetica Neue font on it. This app provides nothing more than Googling for “Seattle weather” would.

While this app may be rather pedestrian, it’s still the prettiest pick of the bunch. Yahoo! got a head start on the iOS 7 aesthetic, with an elegant font and straightforward interface.

The personalization of fetching Flickr photos of the current city was a brilliant move. Not only does Yahoo! already have access to the best pool of photos on the internet, but that level of polish and personal touch makes for a delighting experience every time I open the app.

It’s sad that Yahoo! couldn’t turn some of that imagination into creating a more forward-thinking product. This app functions more like a mobile web app than a full-blown native application, albeit with a strong sense of style.

Sadly, there’s one terrible wart on this app’s user interface. I am almost inclined to think that this was simply an accident, and that some interface element got dragged into the wrong spot, revealing this tacky blemish upon what is mostly a highly refined countenance. Before I say what it is, see if you can spot it:

See that? That single, 1pt Yahoo! Purple border along the top of the screen? That one little line of pixels is one of the most distracting, ugly, and offensive design decisions I’ve seen in a very long time. Perhaps it’s because the rest of the app is so beautiful, or maybe it’s such a useless element, but I just can’t stand it. At least when Yahoo! snuck a dick bar into their otherwise gorgeous redesign of Flickr, it could be hidden with some rudimentary browser tools so I don’t have to be bothered by it. If Yahoo! is seriously trying to make some kind of brand around ugly purple streaks atop their properties, their design team needs to go cold-turkey on the Kool-aid.

If you’re a bit of an information junkie, this app may be for you. While Dark Sky always leaves me with questions, Yahoo! Weather gives a great overview of the current climate, and the user-submitted backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.

Solar

There is an ethos among iOS developers: “make your app do one thing really well.” This design philosophy has served them well, and contributes to many excellent apps. Unfortunately, the designers over at Hollr, Inc. didn’t succeed in making a worthwhile app using this philosophy.

The overall design aesthetic behind Solar is one of complete simplicity. The app displays the current temperature along the top, with a shifting sea of vague colors and rain-like droplets in the background, indicating how the weather makes Solar feel. While the visual designers—if they exist at all—went for the gold with the hyper-minimalist appearance, it’s a swing-and-a-miss for me. I find the app bland; I want to escape the soup of oranges and blues as quickly as possible.

From a usability perspective, Solar is both clunky and unintuitive. Like many a pretentious app being released before it, control is entirely relegated to gestures. While some interfaces aren’t immediately intuitive, they’re easy to map to your muscle memory, making the experience better with time. In Solar, a down swipe drops a three day forecast from the top—a modal action which must be held—and swiping up gradually gives a corresponding hourly forecast. These gestures aren’t mapped to any real-world metaphor, and I’m often accidentally pulling down when trying to figure out if it’ll be raining in an hour, and vice-versa.

Though Solar has been featured as App of the Week in the past, and seems to be fairly popular, I can’t see how it’s worth the time and space when there are so many other fantastic options out there. In the end, it’s a toy product for people who want to dick around with gestures—and unfulfilling ones at that. I can’t recommend purchasing this product when there are so many others on the market that do what Solar does, and much more.

Recommendations

Get Dark Sky. Yes, it’s about the cost of cheap coffee. Yes, it’s worth every penny. Great apps are worth your hard-earned cash. Unlike that stick of gum, apps are useful every day, and you’ll certainly be grateful for having this gem on your phone. Especially when living in a rainy city like I do, eliminating the worry of being rained on is a huge convenience.

Yahoo! Weather is free, so if you’re interested in a more recreational weather experience, give it a whirl. Though unimaginative, the pictures are pretty, at least.

Don’t waste your money on Solar. If you have some change burning a hole in your pocket, get a fun little game instead.

[hdyddsfhfdjngfdh]

oh heck I'm in such a great mood and I love it when people call me rad it's one of the best compliments I've ever

[addictedtowonder-blog]

Heads up! Solar, the gorgeous app from Hollr, is now free at the App Store. Download it now! Solar's is minimalistic, but it's a joy to use and interact with. By far, it's my favorite weather app. Thanks for the tip, Verge!

[gayylover-blog]

Mel fact #23

Mel's name is Melody

[lxnear]

Its my birthday!

:-) .

[subliminal-trends]

SOLAR, AN IPHONE APP BY HOLLR

Solar, c'est une application iPhone pour avoir les prévisions météo. Pourquoi la télécharger alors que celle de base fonctionne très bien me demanderez-vous : parce-qu'elle est très jolie, agréable et pratique à utiliser, bien pensée tout simplement.

Elle est disponible ici à 0,79€ pour un temps limité.