There's an app that'll show you the temperature in realtime on the icon without the need to open the app. It's called eWeather HD and uses the notifications feature of iOS in a pretty clever way. The app itself is a little obtuse, but having the temperature right there has made it worthwhile to me.
The thing is that Apple has not so far allowed really and truly dynamic icons on the home screen. This bothers some of us, since we'd like to have some notifications or displays visible from that screen. This is neat because it allows that, although in a limited way.
My understanding of it is that they're working within the constraints of WebKit in iOS. Developers aren't able to update the icon in realtime, but if you have a homescreen webapp it can update the icon each time you launch it. This is a nice workaround, since I used to launch my homescreen weather app every ten minutes, and chances are the temperature hasn't changed much since the last time I checked. I say "used to" because I use the Weather widget in Notification Center.
Is there something I am missing? Why would you be checking the weather so often? I agree that this is a novel use of a site icon, but it has limited (minimal) advantages.
One possible reason is that the calendar date can be computed locally, the weather would require a data pull which needs to be scheduled, cached, battery managed, etc...
I think the value here isn't really displaying weather. I believe the author effectively demonstrates an interesting technique that non-native apps can utilize to make them feel more native.
As far as awesome and simple non-native weather apps go, check out: http://pattern.dk/sun/
Suggestion: Add city name. I know you don't want to clutter the interface, thus the name minimalist weather, but it makes me nervous to look at a screen and hope it has determined my location accurately. It makes me skeptical about the results too, as I didn't get any notifications on OS X Lion saying "minimalistweather.com wants to use your location". Also it displayed a gorgeous "25 degrees", while OS X's weather widget says "29 degrees"...
Thanks. But make ˚C -> ˚F an option! Many of us don't have the faintest idea what 100˚F is (I must multiply it with 5, divide it by 9 and subtract 32 or 23 from it... too much work)!
(as a side note: for the benefit of others, ˚ is typed with option-k. I had to try a million different combination until I found it).
Very nice as a hack. I am not sure about the usability of it, and a lot of the comments already capture that. If you really wanted to hack this, how about the following:
1. You package it as an app (not that hard to do, from where you'll be starting)
2. You let people set parameters for how often they want to be notified, for which city and in which scale
3. You use the push notification feature to push them the notifications as per their settings.
But all that's just trying to create the better weather app/notifier. And there's tons of ways to do that.
What you've done is really cool with the icon becoming the widget, and for that, it is a great idea. Makes me think what else you could be using this hack for - not just weather. Imagine sponsorship space - share icon space with main advertiser for a content app. Or display your high score in a game. Or show the last badge you earned in a gamified app....the possibilities are endless. Very cool hack!
Is there a weather app that shows me the weather right now relative to the weather at the same time yesterday?
I don't know about you guys but I always evaluate weather in relative terms("it's cooler than yesterday morning") and yet most apps just throw the temperature at you...which could be wildly deceiving depending on wind etc.
It's not an app (or at least, it isn't a standalone feature of an app), but if you search on wolfram alpha, it usually provides a handy graph for the past. I'm always wondering the same thing as well.
I've tried a lot of weather apps, and my favorite, by far, is eWeatherHD. It does just what you're asking - with a last 24 hour trace of temp and barometric pressure. It will also show you the next 12 hours of temp, what temp it feels like, chance precip, UV index, and other things.
Not affiliated in any way, but really appreciate all the details in this app, and was annoyed at all the app purchases I'd made that only showed a portion of what I wanted to know.
I also like the sunrise/set, moonrise/set, moon phase info. I only miss tide info, but am not at the beach that often anyway.
Pretty clever to generate the image for the app icon.
I did a similar thing where I converted a screenshot of a bus schedule to a data URI and saved it to my homescreen. I did it so I could check the bus schedule in places without service.
If you look at the screenshot of the home screen, you'll notice that this is not an Android device and thus has no Android widgets. So, no, that's not "all this is doing".
No, in fact this particular implementation will only update the icon AFTER you load the page (from what I can gather anyway). Not sure why that is valuable.
It may also be pertinent to note that there are no widgets for iOS, so something as basic as live weather becomes a bit of a chore.
That's fair. I didn't figured out a way to keep a clean UI and switch unit. Will add a query param and think something for the interface. Thank you for the feedback.
Ugh... minimal doesn't have to mean useless. In my mind you could display four times as many stats about the weather and still be a far cry from the clutter-fuck that is weather.com. As it is this is useless for anybody who wants to know anything beyond "is it hot or cold right now."
Still this is enough for some people (like me) who just want to see the current temperature. There are plenty of sites/apps that do what you said so no need to tag this one as 'useless'.
Hm? My window provides an experience rather close to reality, except the 'getting soaked by summer rain' part. I wouldn't call that 'minimal'. Maybe your window is broken. Does it run iOS, Android or WP7?
The really, really, really poor man's widget. What's the point if it's showing me stale data? If it's been so long that I can't remember the temperature, I'm going to have to launch the app anyway.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding it but it seems like an anti-feature to me.