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It’s only been a few days into the new year and I’ve already been disappointed dozens of times. Each time, muscle memory pulled the phone out of my pocket and my thumb reached where Dark Sky was. My weather app is dead, bought and killed by Apple, and I’m adrift. don’t laugh at me Also, don’t think I’m exaggerating about this.it can start raining at any time When I don’t know.
If you don’t know what Dark Sky is, you might want to skip it. Knowing what Dark Sky was, I’m struggling to find an alternative app that can do what Dark Sky did. Open the app and it will tell you when it starts to rain in 17 minutes. It’s not 16 or 18, it’s 17. It’s become an integral part of my going-out routine.You know the key/phone/wallet patodown? It may be better not to leave the house now.
I’ve enjoyed Dark Sky’s decade since it started as a Kickstarter project before releasing the app in 2012. ,I bought it. It was just after midnight on the East Coast on New Year’s Day when the date of death was announced last summer (trust me, I checked, and I checked a few more times just to be sure). My iOS app has gone dark. Dark Sky’s functionality is probably “integrated” into Apple’s native weather app, but I’ve spent the last few months training myself to use Apple Weather. There is nothing intuitive or beautiful about the app. Everything in it becomes difficult to find and read.
The funny thing here is that Dark Sky’s big selling point is that it’s not very good according to real meteorologists. The science behind that latest precipitation forecast was pretty unscientific. Simply put, I was looking at the raindrops on the radar map and their speed of movement to calculate how long it would take for those raindrops to travel to where you were.
“We were processing images,” Andrew Blum told Slate. “[A]It was about taking radar visual inputs and guessing what would happen in the next few hours. “
Of course, meteorology is much more complicated than that. Almost unimaginable, literally unfathomably complex. As such, highly educated, trained, intelligent and trained professionals using state-of-the-art hardware and software still struggle to accurately forecast the weather. out for a few days. For a changing and complex storm, even in its direct path, Dark Sky’s “the blob is there because it was here” engine is educated guesswork and well-hyped. I was.
Still, Dark Sky was more right than wrong, and often right enough to be useful. But what sets this app apart from others, and that no other app on the market today can replace it, is the recognition of the importance of design. It was comfortable to look at and fun to use. A minimal display and an aesthetic that I would describe as almost organic: a graphic showing rain is pulsing, splashing, and splashing, and from all over the package, radar in a muted blue tint to his map There was up to Everything you need can be found on the first screen or just a tap away. It felt like it was made for normal people who didn’t want to learn the ins and outs of the entire UI to know what coat to wear.
Example: Want to know the dew point at 1:00 PM on Saturday? In Dark Sky, scrolling down and tapping once showed hourly dew points for the next 10 days. Apple Weather scrolls, taps, taps drop-down menu, taps, taps and holds. Only the dew point for a specific time is available. Everyone has to live like this.
Ah, but it’s no use lamenting the spilled millibars. So what should Dark Sky addicts do to fix this problem? I tried several alternatives but none worked. AccuWeather is impersonal and too complicated. Weather Underground was decent until it was acquired by IBM and went downhill. WeatherBug is useful, but it has its drawbacks. Carrots are irresistibly tweed. Apple Weather, of all kinds, never becomes Dark Sky. For now, all we can do is mourn the Silicon Valley habit of buying good things and making them worse, mourning what we’ve lost, and celebrating the time we’ve had together. You’ll remember Sky and it could have been dry.
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