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Weather apps present a unique combination of opportunities and challenges for designers. They can be beautiful, with animations or images mimicking a sky full of clouds or a skyline at sunset. But there's also constantly changing data to present in a way that's both coherent and attractive. It's very easy for a weather app to err on either side of the aesthetic/academic divide.
This makes for a fairly predicable weather app landscape. There are pretty weather apps, and there are useful weather apps. The best ones, such as Yahoo Weather and Dark Sky, manage to be both of those things. AccuWeather's completely overhauled app may be prettier and more useful than either of them, which is no small feat.
These slick aesthetics are a new thing for AccuWeather. Until the new version that launched today on Apple's App Store, AccuWeather fell more on the utilitarian side of the spectrum. That's not necessarily a bad thing: The free app has always offered a wealth of meteorological information -- it was just trapped inside a somewhat pedestrian interface. Thankfully, the new app doesn't sacrifice functionality to achieve its minimalist new look.
In fact, this new look only serves to make AccuWeather more versatile. The marquee addition to the app is the MinuteCast, which was born of AccuWeather's late-2013 acquisition of Sky Motion. MinuteCast gives you a minute-by-minute rundown of what the weather will be for the next two hours. The idea here is that it can help you decide when to make a break for it outside during a rain storm, or when to plan your snow-free drive home. There's an online version of MinuteCast that you can take for a spin, but keep in mind that the app presents the same info much differently.
If you've used the $4 Dark Sky app, the MinuteCast wing of the new AccuWeather app will be familiar. The big differences between the two are that AccuWeather is free, and its data is organized in a significantly different way than Dark Sky.
To help you plan a dry journey on foot, MinuteCast shows you a circular radar-like screen with the next 120 minutes of weather. Rainy or snowy patches show up as colored areas on the radar view, and scrubbing the timeline to those areas shows you what you're in for ("Snow will start in 88 minutes," "Rain will start in 7 minutes," etc.). It'll also tell you how long it's expected to last.
AccuWeather Chief Digital Officer Steven Smith says AccuWeather and Dark Sky tackle the same goal -- hyperlocal and timely weather reports to keep you safe and/or dry -- but with different approaches.
"It's a big-data problem," says Smith about the information that feeds into the MinuteCast reports. "We use the highest-resolution Doppler radar data in combination with surface observations, including airport observation sites and roadside weather instrumentation." According to Smith, the MinuteCast reports are accurate within a half-kilometer range and update every five minutes.
While the MinuteCast feature is only available for U.S. locations at launch, cities abroad are coming soon.
"We will be adding Canada within the next few weeks," says Smith. "Then expanding to other parts of the world -- Japan and Europe in 2014.”
It's important to note that despite all its magic, MinuteCast is still a weather-prediction device. It does make mistakes and erroneous forecasts, but it's accurate enough to be impressive and useful for planning your day. The week I spent testing MinuteCast was pretty much perfect timing, as New York City saw some erratic weather patterns. There were rain, snow, and unexpected dry patches scattered throughout the week.
MinuteCast wasn't always spot-on accurate in terms of when each storm or dry spell would start -- but neither was any other weather app or website I checked during that time. The MinuteCast reports erred on the side of caution several times, warning me of snow flurries an hour or more away that never surfaced. In general, the farther away a storm was within a two-hour time frame, the less accurate the impending forecast would be.
But there were notable exceptions, such as the snow flurries Wednesday morning that were predicted well in advance. And when it did actually snow, the MinuteCast reports were fairly accurate in predicting when they'd start or lighten up. A few times, the app told me that "Snow will end in X minutes," and even though the snow didn't stop altogether, it started falling more lightly within a minute or two of the predicted time. It's ultimately very handy, but it's certainly not perfect.
AccuWeather says these short-term forecasts can also be used for local advertising purposes. One example would be a coffee shop using weather information, the expected duration of a rain storm, and the user's location to send timely alerts and deals like "duck in here for a dollar off your coffee while it's raining." Nothing like that exists just yet, but AccuWeather Chief Marketing Officer John Dokes did mention it as a possibility.
MinuteCast offers plenty of wow factor, but unless you live in a place that's particularly rainy or snowy, the app's other features will be more useful. Some of the new goodies are familiar pieces of eye candy, such as animated representations of the current weather on a city’s overview screen, and themes that change from day to night depending on the local time.
The app's customization options are also strong. In fact, the only non-customizable part of the main screen is the top part of it. You'll always see the current temperature for your chosen city in a circle, AccuWeather's "RealFeel" equivalent, and a link to the MinuteCast readings below. Scrolling down the page surfaces a number of customizable modules, which you can drag and drop to reorder as you like; a few of the modules also have customizable settings within them.
Among the shufflable modules are a text-based "Looking Ahead" report that gives you a brief forecast for the next few days, highlighting any major weather events that may be on the horizon. A side-scrolling, customizable dashboard of deeper data -- humidity, wind speed and direction, visibility, cloud cover, and more -- is below that in the default layout.
The first modules I dragged to the top of the queue were the longer-term reports. There's an hour-by-hour report that lets you side-scroll through the next three days. You also have a customizable daily-forecast module that can be set to anything from one to 25 days. It displays each day's information in a vertical list, however, so it turns into a laundry list if you set it for anything more than a week.
If you're curious to see what the weather’s like elsewhere, there's a map module with a radar data overlay. By tapping different areas of the world, you see current weather information in that location: The temperature and an icon that indicates whether it's rainy, sunny, or snowy. Another module shows sunrise/sunset information and lunar-phase data.
The custom options even extend to the app's Settings menu. You can choose to display different units of measure (Fahrenheit or Celsius, MPH or Km/H for windspeed, inches or centimeters for rainfall or snowfall, and so on).
Again, we're talking about a free app here -- one that offers immediate forecasts, several-day outlooks, and everything in between. It's already become my go-to weather app, because it does so much. You should give it a shot too. AccuWeather is available right now for iOS, with an Android version coming soon. It's a ray of light in an often overcast and crowded category.
