The Dark Sky's iOS App Will Stop Working Imminently (theverge.com) 52
The time has come: Dark Sky, the (mostly) beloved weather app for iOS is going to stop working on January 1st, according to in-app warnings. From a report: The sunsetting has been in the forecast for a while -- Apple announced it was planning on shutting down the service last year after acquiring it in 2020, and it removed Dark Sky from the App Store a few months ago, according to 9to5Mac. But if you've been putting off finding a new weather app, now's the time to finally get around to it. As for what alternatives iPhone users have available (the Android app was axed in 2020), perhaps the most obvious is Apple's own built-in Weather app. The company even has a support document titled "How Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app," which talks about how features from the former have been added to the later. Further reading: The World's Best Terrible Weather App.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
Glad you have low standards. The whole reason it was called Dark Sky was that this app provided something to amateur astronomers that you don't get in your crappy default app.
I'll let you research why it was so praised among the group. Maybe on your journey you can learn something.
Re: Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
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"I'll let you research why it was so praised among the group."
Go ahead, do the "research", just prepare to be disappointed.
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I did the research given I am an amateur astronomer. It provided the most accurate short and long term cloud coverage report available.
Again there's a reason we all used it. The only thing disappointing is that Apple destroyed it.
Astronomy sky source⦠(Score:2)
https://www.cleardarksky.com/c... [cleardarksky.com]
Re: Nothing to see here (Score:2)
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Re: Nothing to see here (Score:1)
7Timer.info or Xasteria app for astronomers (Score:4, Informative)
For amateur astronomers, there is the completely free alternative of 7Timer [7timer.info]. It is less good for short-term forecasts (it is based on the Global Forecast System, which takes up to 6 hours to calculate), but for most locations it's about as good as you can do for mid-long term forecasts and adds transparency and astronomical seeing.
It's an ad-free website created by a researcher that provides a free API as well and I develop the iOS client Xasteria [apple.com] for it - also free with no ads. I provide the servers for 7Timer, at first I just covered the cost, but to get faster servers I created Xasteria Plus [apple.com] - a $0.99 app that added Dark Sky, which pretty much covers the servers. Now that Apple is sunsetting the Dark Sky API, I will have to switch to something else as an extra source.
Anyway, if you observe the night sky, I suggest you add 7Timer to your sources. No forecast is accurate enough of course, so it is worth checking more sources, especially if they rely on very different models (e.g. 7Timer uses the GFS which is a hydrostatic model, other sources might use non-hydrostatic like ECMWF, NEMS).
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For amateur astronomers, there is the completely free alternative of 7Timer [7timer.info].
Yep this is where most people migrated to after Dark Skys got bought.
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But the amateur astronomers I know did not use it. Dark Sky became dominated by those who just wanted hyper local weather
Funny. All amateur astronomers I know care almost exclusively about hyper local weather. The majority of them have migrated to 7timer which also provides hyper local weather.
So? (Score:2)
I can't remember the last time I got a useful weather forecast aside from warnings of a big storm coming in. In NoCal the daily forecasts serve mostly to tell you what's not going to happen, which is to say, whatever they said would. And I can find out about storms from WX
Obligatory (Score:1)
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#AppleSux (Score:2)
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Why (Score:3, Insightful)
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GNU was created by a silver-spooner who had never worked a job yet felt entitled to someone else's work without paying for it.
Silver spooner or not, what he felt entitled to was choice. And thanks in very large part to his efforts, billions of people have it.
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Stallman, don't you have a different slashdot account?
Re: Why (Score:2, Insightful)
Not everyone wants to administer their computing devices. Some people just want to be passengers. Freedom also means the freedom to use proprietary software.
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> Why would any sensible person want to pay to use a
> computer where someone else controls what
> programs you can run?
Well, if you'd bothered to actually read the article, you'd know it's the service that's being shut down on the backend. And there's no "kill switch" that's going to block the Dark Sky app from launching. There will just be no data for it to access. It's be no different from... say... Evernote going out of business (Or being acquired and having the functionality folded into anoth
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Google HAS, in fact, done exactly that. There used to be a music streaming App for the iPhone called Simplify Media, that I was very fond of. Basically, you ran an agent on your Mac, and... this was back in the days of only 16 and 32GB iPhones... the iPhone app would stream any music or playlists from your home library.
Google bought Simplify Media, folded its functionality into one of their own products, and discontinued the Mac agent, iPhone app, and the service that connected them. Sound familiar? And
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Why would any sensible person want to pay to use a computer where someone else controls what programs you can run?
Nice rant but completely off topic. The issue here isn't that someone pays for a computer that decides what software to run, it's that a mega company bought a piece of software and decided it will no longer be available to people outside of its own ecosystem.
No amount of Richard Stallmanning gets you out of this issue.
As an alternative, may I recomend yr.no (Score:5, Informative)
Either the App, or the website itself.
Yes, is bery basic and barebones, not many bells and whistles there... but the predictions are Spot-On.
Part of that is the use of the European weather model instead of the ("recently" improved) American weather model
Citation needed?
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
Re: As an alternative, may I recomend yr.no (Score:2)
Re: As an alternative, may I recomend yr.no (Score:4, Informative)
This!
I travelled to Norway a few years ago and asked a local engineer (near Bergen) what they used for local forecasts and he said yr.no. He said it was incredibly accurate, in his opinion the best he'd ever seen. I was surprised how good it was, then realized a) it covers the US as well, and b) there's a pretty good app for it.
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Is there a free iOS weather app that uses yr.no?
Re: As an alternative, may I recomend yr.no (Score:2)
Yes. It's called yr.no
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Either the App, or the website itself.
Yes, is bery basic and barebones, not many bells and whistles there... but the predictions are Spot-On.
Part of that is the use of the European weather model instead of the ("recently" improved) American weather model
Citation needed?
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
Had never heard of them; checked out their website; looks interesting but I couldn't figure out how to make it display in the web based version in Fahrenheit and mph, or even knots. Doesn't do users much good if the numbers require translation from one system of units to another. Looked for it here [hjelp.yr.no] but didn't find it. Maybe the app is different, but I'm not going to check; I'll leave that for someone else, as the built-in weather app on my Android phone does what I need it to do.
You are not a user of the DarkSkyes App
You are not a user of the Crap iOS App
You were not the intended target of the recomendation of yr.no.
The fact you preffer Freedumb units, or that you are not smart enough* to do the conversion is inconsequential to the issue at hand.
* Also, again, not smart enough to realize you are not the target audience for the recomendation.
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By the way, while you were telling me how smart I'm not, you misspelled a bunch of words, including "recommendation," and "prefer," which I thought was hilarious. Now, you can argue that where YOU'RE from, that's just how those words are spelled, and that's fine, and I would respect that, (or at least pretend to).
I do not speak English as my first language*, I tought that was clear by the fact that my sig is in Spanish, but again, some people are not smart enough to deduce it from the sig.
What I'll do, is that I'll bet you dollars to quarters that my english is better than your spanish, and dollar for dollar that my spoken french is better than your spoken spanish...
It seems you need a drawing, so to help you deduce the rest:
YR.NO is paid for by the Nowegian govt/taxpayers, the website (with no publicity), the app
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Blah blah blah.
No sabe usted en cuantos idomas puedo escribir. Es mejor que usted no asume cual otros personas puede y no puede hacer. (I could also have written that in German, but I'm not going to bother since if you knew how to read that, you'd surely have mentioned it while you were showing off how many languages you pretend to know. Also, my Spanish is probably just a little better than my German, since though I studied German longer, it was also longer ago.)
Is "usted no asuma" not "asume", is "otras personas pueden" not "otros personas pueden", is "que es lo que" ot some other construct, not "cual".
As you see, writing in one's non native language is quite hard. I made mistakes (which you pointed out) in my non-native language, you made mistakes (which I pointed out) in your non-native language, we all make mistakes in our non-native languages. I had 296/300 in my TOEFL way back when... how was your DELE?
And yes, you were either dumping on the norwegians, or be
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
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Interface interface interface (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, at least half the value of a weather app is in its interface. I have a job where getting very local weather forecasts are important, so I have lots of forecast apps, and my go-to ones are the ones with a better interface. Dark Sky had a great UI. Wunderground's is pretty good as well, if you can stand the intrusive ads. AccuWeather used to have a great UI until a few years ago, when they announced "an all new look" which effectively broke its usability. The apple app isn't actually that bad either.
If you want a chuckle, the app WTForecast is a foul-mouthed weather app. It's pretty accurate, and extremely funny.
Confession: (Score:2)
I actually listen to the local meteorologist for the most useful forecast near my house. Sometimes I pretend I'm using an app for it by opening my local news station's app and playing the forecast video. But I have found a verbal/visual forecast to be more useful than any of the several weather apps I have. I think part of it is in the amount of context you get with a verbal meteorologist telling you what's happening. I'm in the Boston, US, area, and am partial to one of our local meteorologists (Kevin Lema
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I too have a frog and a mini-ladder in a jar in my garden :)
Paired with my grandparent's arthritic joints, its flawless.
Why do weather apps suck? (Score:2)
I get that predictions are hard... but the quality of *observations* is also complete junk. I have 5-6 miserable apps... why isn't there anything better?
Broke down and got my own weather station for home... but its WiFi functionality is broken as it needs to connect to several random Chinese websites to qualify it.
Alternatives ... (Score:2)
I have been using Dark Sky for quite some time, mainly through the Python API, to get custom astronomical forecasts.
My forecast can never be as comprehensive as astrospheric [astrospheric.com], but it has a few features that are unique, such as notifying me via email when the upcoming evening has 3 or more hours of clear sky, and includes the phase of the moon and wind, so I can make a decision on whether to get setup or not.
But then Apple purchased Dark Sky [darksky.net], and started to gradually end-of-life various services (Android app,