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Klyme: A colorful way to look at your local weather
Klyme (Free) is a new weather application for iPhone that arrived on the App Store today. The app is the latest in a parade of recent applications that promise to offer a new way to view your local weather and share conditions with others. How does it measure up to that promise? Let's take a look. Klyme has a gorgeous user interface, providing a colorful background with local weather conditions. That background varies from cool (bluish) tones when it's cold out to warm (orange and red) tones when the temperature is hotter. But what's new and different is the swipeable panel at the bottom of the screen. Weather details shows at a glance how severe weather conditions will be in terms of wind, humidity, precipitation probability, and visibility. Swipe to the left, and you get an idea of the type of clothing you should consider wearing. For example, with our most recent snow here in the Denver area (yes, on May 11th), the app showed a jacket, pants (duh!), a hat, and gloves -- not a bad guess for the chilly conditions. Another swipe and you're taking a look at the overall weather sentiment. I'm not sure how accurate this is, as it appears to be based on the "votes" of anyone who happens to be in your area and who also uses the app to post their sentiment about the weather. Finally, one more swipe takes you to an idea of some activities that you might want to take part in. For the snow, Klyme told me to have some tea to warm me up. Not a bad idea! While the app shows current conditions by default, moving the moon or sun through the sky with a circular swipe displays the expected conditions. For "scattered flurries", the app showed gently falling snowflakes in the background, a nice touch. Other conditions show similar animations. Sharing any of the information about the weather is done with a tap on a "plus" button, which lets you write a short note, add a photo, insert a quick one-word description of your activity, and then an icon showing your general mood about the weather. Sharing can be done to Facebook and Twitter. If you decide that you'd like to snap a photo of the current weather, Klyme even includes a selection of photo filters to make your image more dramatic. Finally, if you'd like to see a long-term forecast, all Klyme asks is that you turn your iPhone sideways. The expected low and high temperatures for the day are displayed along with three circles graphically showing the precipitation probability, expected cloud cover, and possibility of wind. Now, about the app. Temperatures can be displayed as "real feel", which indicates to the user how cold or hot it really feels thanks to wind, humidity and other factors. This can be somewhat confusing, as I initially thought the app was just way off (by nine to twelve degrees F) before realizing that it was giving me the "real feel" numbers. Turning off "real feel", the temperatures were within two to three degrees F of the temp provided by the professional weather station I have installed. In addition, the pre-release version of Klyme also had some issues with inconsistent units. While there is a settings switch for changing temperature between degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, the weather details "bubbles" on the app home screen consistently showed metric units for wind velocity and visibility. Items like these can be fixed rather easily, so the big question for readers considering Klyme is "Do I need another weather app?" I love the app's use of color and animation, and being able to "drag the sun" across your iPhone screen to see an hourly forecast is pretty unique. I'm not exactly sure how developers AppaDeus plan to make money off of Klyme; perhaps they'll add features in the future as in-app purchases. Regardless of the business plan of the developers, Klyme is definitely worth considering as a primary weather app on your iPhone. Klyme requires iOS 7.0 or later and is optimized for the iPhone 5.
