TodayWeather
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Today Weather is a tidy weather app for iPhone
Savvy Apps has released Today Weather (US$1.99), a great-looking weather app for the iPhone. It lets you monitor conditions across several cities via four distinct views. Nice touches like weather alerts, NOAA scale-compliant colors and clever navigation make Today Weather quite pleasant to use. Looks Weather apps are interesting to me in that I don't spend much time looking at them, yet I really like it when the look good. I'll use a Twitter client, Apple's Mail or a calendaring app many times per day. By contrast I'll check the weather once, maybe twice at the most. But a great-looking app -- and, more importantly, a legible app with simple navigation -- can make those two occurrences very pleasant. In short, Today Weather looks great. There are four views: seven-day forecast, current conditions, hourly forecast (across three days) and the dashboard. There's also a simple preferences screen. Note that the photos in my gallery below show the darker night view. During the day, all screens have a white background. %Gallery-173163% The seven-day screen shows an icon representing the day's predicted weather, a percentage chance of precipitation (if any is expected) and a clever bar graph showing each day's highs and/or lows (more on that later). The current conditions screen shows the current temp in big, bold numbers that are so easy to read. White on grey, top of the screen and above additional information like high and low, icon representing the current condition, chance of precipitation, wind speed and direction plus three hourly highs. You can also tap a map icon to jump to that city's location on a map. The hourly forecast presents a list view of each day's hourly temperature predictions, including sunrise and setting times. Finally, the dashboard shows each city's name, current time, weather icon, current temp plus high and low. That's a lot of information and Today Weather manages to present it in an orderly manner. None of this feels cluttered. Use Start by adding a city (or several) whose weather you'd like to track. You'll find an upward-facing arrow in the lower right-hand corner of most screens. Tap it to enter the dashboard editor. From here you can add a new city, delete the defaults or re-order them. You can even insert a new city between two existing ones, so it appears in your preferred order right off the bat. Nice. Once that's all set, tap any city to return to the dashboard. You can scroll up and down or tap any city to jump to its hourly forecast. From there, you've got two navigational choices. Swipe up or down to move through the hourly forecasts for each monitored city. For example, if you're watching the weather in Paris, LA and Scranton (it could happen), swiping up and down will toggle through the reports for Paris, LA and Scranton, respectively. Your other option is to swipe left and right. Left and right moves you between screens. For example, tap Scranton on the dashboard to open its hourly forecast screen, then swipe left for its current conditions screen and left again for its seven-day forecast. Again, swipe up and down on any screen to toggle between cities. Got it? The seven-day screen has a neat trick. Tap on the bar graph to toggle between highs and lows vs. highs alone. Another trick lets you move between screens by pinching. Not the fastest way to navigate, but fun. When a weather app offers so much, it's easy to want more. An animated radar map would be nice, for instance. But really, this is what I'm most interested in. Today Weather is available in the App Store now.
