Wthr
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Wthr Complete is a weather app with details and a nice desgn
There are so many weather apps out there... As a general rule, I often find that the pretty ones don't have a lot of information, and the ones with more information provided have worse user interfaces. Wthr Complete (US$1.99) breaks that rule by adding a lot of depth and a beautiful interface. It has all the usual information, but adds things I like such as sunrise/sunset times and moon phases. It also adds 150 U.S. NOAA weather stations to give you audio forecasts and alerts. There are also detailed radar maps with animation, earthquake maps and the maps have layers so you can see a basic map or satellite view. Perhaps the most unique feature is a database of the last four years of weather information for any location for any particular day. I find that really useful, as people are always wondering what the weather was on this date last year or the year before. No more guesswork on that subject. The app has notifications of course, for severe weather and flooding. You can add any number of other cities, and when the app launches you can select the city you want. Weather conditions have nice animations, and there is nerdy stuff like ultraviolet intensity and dew point as well. All in all, Wthr Complete is a really nice weather app. Although it is universal, it runs only in portrait mode so many iPad users who spend the day in landscape mode will be unhappy. I'm amazed that developers haven't figured this out. I see new apps almost every week that are locked into the portrait orientation. Dumb. In the wild, almost every iPad I see is in a case or on a stand in landscape mode. Aside from that failing, Wthr Complete is one terrific little app. It requires iOS 7.1 or later, and it's scaled properly for the iPhone 5 and 6 phones. There are nice weather apps for free, including Apple's and the well-designed Yahoo weather app, but Wthr Complete goes deeper and is just as pretty.
Wthr is a well thought out and innovative weather app for iOS
Whtr is a free universal app (with in-app purchase options) with a fresh take on how weather information should be presented and organized. The screens are very clean and simple. The app UI is gesture-based, so swiping up brings up the next screen. There is a clever option to drag the current temperature around an arc that represents a clock to show you future temperature predictions. You can also use the same gestures for predictions of air quality. The free version is quite complete, providing wind speeds, conditions in my favorite cities, sunset and sunrise times, dew point and more. The app covers about a million locations around the world, and using my iPhone's GPS capabilities it had no trouble pinpointing my home location. There are 2 in-app purchases. The $1.99 purchase adds more features, including adding more than two cities as favorites and providing visibility readouts. An HD Radar upgrade ($2.99) provides a NOAA-sourced radar plot. I like Whtr. The free version is ad-free, which is very commendable. The extra features are worthwhile, but I'd rather see the radar and other features bundled into a $1.99 upgrade. One bug I noticed was that if I scrolled the interface down to radar, which I hadn't purchased, the app seemed to get stuck and I could not go back to the weather conditions. I had to shut the app down to start again. Also, to get to the city list, you pinch the main screen -- which isn't very intuitive. An icon for that function might save users some frustration. There's a lot of fresh thinking in Wthr, but don't forget Yahoo Weather (free) or WeatherBug (free and optional in-app purchases to remove ads) which in my view are the two top general weather apps around. Wthr runs on any iOS hardware that supports iOS 7 or later. It is optimized for the iPhone 5.
