Savvy Apps’ Today Weather, my favorite iOS weather app, has been updated today to include support for Dark Sky alerts and Forecast.io, the Dark Sky Company’s recently launched weather service that comes with an API for third-party developers. Available as a $0.99 In-App Purchase, support for Forecast won’t turn Today Weather into an interface for Forecast Lines (another product from the Dark Sky Company, focused on displaying weather trends), but instead it’ll simply enable Forecast.io as a new weather source alongside Weather Underground.
While the Dark Sky iPhone app is primarily limited to North America, Forecast.io is a global weather service that aggregates data (temperature, pressure, forecasts, etc.) from various sources, statistically providing “the most accurate forecast possible for a given location”. I have been testing Today Weather with Forecast.io for the past month, and results were more accurate than Weather Underground for the Italian locations I tried: Viterbo (where I live), Montalto di Castro, and Rome. Weather Underground has been reliable in the past, but Forecast.io data had a series of minor differences that, eventually, proved to be true; admittedly, it wasn’t a major divergence in terms of temperatures and forecasts, but still accurate.
Dark Sky alerts are equally interesting: sitting in the top right corner of a location’s summary veiw, they provide a handy summary for Now, Next Hour, Next 3 Hours, and “Today and Upcoming” forecasts. I am a fan of Dark Sky’s human-readable text summaries, but, alas, temperatures haven’t been localized to Celsius (I believe this is a Dark Sky API limitation), and, at least for my saved locations, there’s not much information available for Next Hour and Next 3 Hours. I am sure that, for countries with better availability of weather tracking services and data providers, Today Weather’s Dark Sky alerts will offer even better summaries.
I like Today Weather and I’m a fan of The Dark Sky Company’s work on Dark Sky and Forecast. The $0.99 In-App Purchase is a no-brainer if you want to try Forecast.io’s data into Savvy Apps’ solid weather client.
