All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Coaching and otherwise volunteering in Little League has taught me a lot about using my phone. A couple of years ago, I wrote about using Phonevite to automate calling all the players on your team. Last year, when I was the director of a competitive division for the first time, I discovered a hidden truth: The middle-aged men associated with your average Little League send more text messages than any three teenagers. In fact, I ended up having to switch to an unlimited text plan!
This year, I've learned that accurate intel about weather makes the season run much more smoothly. Rain-outs wreak havoc with the schedule – they eliminate opportunities for practice, and makeup games can create real inequities in the schedule. And the app that gives me that intel, the app that has become one the most-used apps on my phone, is Dark Sky (iOS, $3.99).
Dark Sky is a weather app with a very specific focus: Highly accurate, extremely short-term weather predictions. If you want to know whether it will rain in the next hour, Dark Sky will tell you. It's extremely easy on the eyes, too. Here's a screenshot of the iPhone app:
And here's Dark Sky on the iPad:
I do love the bar as a way of expressing both how much rain to expect and how reliable the forecast is. But Dark Sky particularly shines on those days when the weather can't seem to make up its mind. That's when you'll see predictions such as, "Light rain for 7 minutes, stopping for 20, then more rain." Or "Heavy rain for 10 minutes, then no rain." And so forth. While these predictions have occasionally been off by a minute or two, I must say that in almost an entire season of daily use, it has never been altogether wrong. When it has said the rain will stop, the rain has stopped. And conversely, when it has said that rain will fall, the games have been scrubbed. There have been many days when the skies have darkened, the temperature has dropped a little, and a storm has seemed imminent – but no rain has fallen during game times. Dark Sky has gotten every one of these right.
Adam Grossman has explained a little bit about how Dark Sky works, and why its focus is so limited. It turns out that they're not really doing meteorology:
I loved the concept of this app so much that I backed it on Kickstarter back in October, and have been thrilled. I will say that it is interesting how quickly other features have been added. For example, the app's pretty focused on precipitation, but it now shows current temperature. And version 1.3, released on May 30, even includes a 24-hour forecast function. There are probably other apps that will give you a good take on tomorrow's weather, but it's nice to have this handy. (They're also releasing their prediction data via an API, which is pretty cool.)
The appeal of this isn't just limited to coaches, of course! If you do anything outside with your family, and especially if you live in an area with temperamental or mischievous weather gods, then Dark Sky's indispensable.
Photo "Irish Summer" by Flickr user final gather / Creative Commons licensed BY-ND 2.0
