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Weather Wow for iOS gives you news and weather together
Weather Wow is a clever iOS app that gives you the local information you probably want the most in one package, which is news and weather. The US $0.99 universal app gives you the ability to add as many locations for information that you want, with a simple GUI with a + to add the cities. Both weather and news get selected as a result of that choice. Switching between cities is a matter of touching a left or right pointing arrow. You get a nicely animated look at the current conditions, then a four day forecast scrolls up the screen. After that a few local news stories appear, some from your local paper and some from national news sources when your local area is mentioned. It all works quite well, and I think overall the app is useful. There are a couple of negatives, though. First, no matter what the weather, you see a spinning bright sun graphic. The graphic should match the weather, with a graphic for clouds, rain, snow or whatever, because seeing the sun graphic all the time is misleading. (Update: The developer points out, correctly, that sometimes there are different graphics. For example, overcast shows a gray background, but displaying a bright sun for mostly cloudy and completely clear locations is not visually helpful. Likewise, I went to a city where the app said it was raining, and did not see a rain graphic, just cloudy. There needs to be better parsing of the data to display a more useful graphic.) I'd also like to see the app be location aware. If I'm traveling, the app should use the GPS to find where I am and deliver me local news and weather. I don't want to type my location in every time. That's especially true if I'm in a place with a long name, like, oh, Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. Weather Wow is a nice little app, and I find I check it out often. With a few tweaks it could be really terrific. Check the gallery for some screen shots and you can check out the perennially sunny skies. %Gallery-151095%
