Daily iPhone App: Weathercube is an interesting but eccentric iOS app
Weathercube is an interesting and graphically pleasing approach to giving you the weather on your iPhone or iPod touch. It is not universal, but will run on an iPad in 2x mode. It sells for US$1.99.
Weathercube supports several gestures which will get you to extended forecasts, other pre-set cities and even the settings. It provides a lot of information, and swiping the screen gets you a slick animation that looks like the cube is turning in perspective. If you look at the app icon you can get an idea of the animation effect.
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Where the app fails is displaying the information in an easily accessible format. Here's an example. When you open the app you are presented with sky conditions, temperature, wind speed and barometer reading. At the bottom of the screen, two percentages are displayed. Why two? Because one is cloud cover, the other is humidity, but they are not labelled. Same with temperature.
On the home screen, you get a high temperature prediction, not the current temperature. It's all a bit confusing. If you want the current temperature you need to swipe down for the hourly temperatures, and the current conditions will be at the top. Worse, next to the predicted hourly temperatures is the predicted barometric temperature, which is I think the last thing you would want in a prediction. How about wind speed or humidity?
The app allows you to select background colors to personalize the look of the screens, but with some combinations it is hard to read the labels. Sounds accompany most gestures on the app. I found them distracting, but happily they can be turned off.
These issues can be easily fixed, and if they are, Weathercube will be vastly improved. The display is minimalist, but you can dig pretty deep with gestures. Switching to other cities is easy, and the database has more than 1.7 million locations. The app is also multi-lingual, with support for Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and more.
I like the idea behind the app, I just think more labels, current conditions moved to the home screen and being careful about the colors obscuring the text would go a long way to make the presentation a success.
Weathercube requires iOS 4.3 or later and it's a 9.8 MB download. Some screenshots are below.
