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2 new weather apps just in time for your holiday sojourns
Apalon has released two weather apps that could make your holiday travel more predictable. Weather Live (US$1.99) features animated, customizable backgrounds that look great and a widget for quick access to your most important weather info. You can set a number of different cities, and swipe between them. The main screen offers in-depth weather stats, along with sunrise and sunset times, and 7 day forecasts. Tap on the radar icon and you'll get animated weather radar, and you can set up alerts for freezing temperatures, and for when the temperature drops below zero. The app also features sharing options so you can brag or complain about your weather to family and friends. The app looks very striking, and is about as full-featured as a weather app can be. It also gives you an icon badge with the current temperature, something Apple and Yahoo weather have failed to offer for reasons that escape me. The second app in the set, NOAA Radar Pro ($1.99) is more oriented toward radar. You get a rain map that provides rain forecast for the range of next 24 hours right on the terrain map, satellite cloud cover maps shows real-time cloud cover, and detailed Weather info for any location including current conditions, 24-hour and 7-day forecasts, plus active alerts for practically any location in the USA. Both apps are excellent, but have a pretty large overlap of info. Having one pretty much makes the other unnecessary. NOAA Radar Pro does have more radar data, but I think most people will find the radar display just fine in Weather Live. Both apps look great, and are certainly among the top weather apps I've seen for iOS. Weather Live and NOAA Radar Pro are both universal apps, the requires iOS 7 or later and they are optimized for the iPhone 5 and 6 series of phones. Recommended.
Weather Live for iOS is complete and a looker
Weather apps often sit in one of two groups. A lot of data in a mundane presentation, or beautiful backgrounds and animations but a lack of deep weather data. Weather Live has an excellent mix of both. The US$1.99 universal app has detailed forecasts from anywhere in the world. You can set several cities you want to keep track of, and swipe the screen to view them. Animations reflect the current weather at each location, and the app includes cloud, satellite and radar maps. The app can alert you if bad weather is on the way and you can set an alert to let you know when the temperature drops below freezing. %Gallery-165247% On-screen details include daily and seven-day forecasts, dew point, forecast high and low temperatures, winds, humidity, visibility, sunrise and sunset times, barometer and more. Even better, you can set different display formats, so you can have basic weather information, or a deep dive with everything visible on the main page. The feature that I really like is the icon badge (check the gallery below) that shows the current temperature. It's visible even if the app is buried in a folder. This is something Apple should have done long ago, or let the icon itself update the way the date updates on the Apple Calendar app. No app is perfect, and I find the map displays less than optimal. There is a small dot showing your location, but cities aren't identified, and the map can't be zoomed or moved in any way. I felt the need to see a closer display of storms moving my way, but such a feature is lacking. We reviewed this app last year when it had fewer features but a lower price of $0.99. I think that is about the right price for a weather app, and while $1.99 is not over-priced, especially considering the quality of the app, I was sad to see the price double. If you had to choose just one weather app with a lot of information and a beautiful presentation Weather Live should be on your buy list. Check the gallery below to see the app it all its graphic glory.
Daily iPad App: Weather Live
We've reviewed plenty of weather apps for the iPad on TUAW. Matter of fact I think the high number of weather apps we've reviewed is due to the fact that we're still looking for the perfect iPad weather app. Weather Live isn't that app. It's good, just not the holy grail. First the good. I like Weather Live because it does have beautiful backgrounds (see gallery below) and makes it easy to navigate between cities (just swipe right or left). The app also offers five different layouts and generous display settings. You can of course choose between Fahrenheit/Celsius and miles/kilometers. Like most weather apps for iPad, Weather Live offers a clock, which you can display 12-hour or 24-hour time with or without seconds as well as local or regional times. The app's brightness control is unique. Instead of a slider, you can just drag your finger up or down the screen to adjust the brightness. This is useful if you disable the iPad's auto-lock feature through the app, which lets you use it as a clock on the nightstand. You can see the current time and weather as soon as you get up. Another nice feature puts current temperature as a badge on the icon on your homescreen. Unfortunately, Weather Live suffers from several UI problems that plague other weather apps. Yeah, animated backgrounds are nice, but sometimes the images don't contrast with the text enough so that it's hard to read the forecast. Also, the black and white icons representing weather conditions look too similar, and it's hard to tell them apart when looking at the week view. I'm still looking for an iPad weather app that closely mimics Apple's Weather app on the iPhone: clean design, not a lot of eye candy, easy to get the forecast at a glance. If you're like me and want the same thing out of a weather app for the iPad, Weather Live is not for you (but then again, no iPad weather app is yet). However, if you do like weather apps that are more beautiful than bare-bones-informational, Weather Live is a great choice. It's only US$0.99 and is a universal app, so it works on both the iPad and iPhone. But for me, my search for the perfect iPad weather app continues. %Gallery-140326%
