![]() Besides, right now you should be staying inside anyway to help curb the ongoing pandemic, even on the nicest of days. ![]() Despite earlier conspiracies, the rollout of the 5G wireless network shouldn’t ruin these weather forecasts. As it stands, we'll assume that if a company has invested the time and effort to create its own predictive models for something as complex as weather, then it probably knows more about meteorology than we do.įor what it's worth, the apps were all quite accurate during testing. We're simply not set up to tackle that kind of challenge. Second, and more importantly, to really determine the accuracy of the service's model, we'd have to perform exhaustive tests across the globe. The Weather Channel and a few other companies have their own predictive models, but many apps are just shells into which data flows. Some also pull their predictions from AccuWeather, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Our reasons are twofold: First, most weather apps get the bulk of their data from the National Weather Service. What we didn't look for is whether or not the predicted weather came to pass. If you have to dig through several screens to find out when it's going to rain, the app is off to a bad start. An ideal weather app is visually pleasing and easy to use. When testing weather apps, we spent most of our time evaluating the effectiveness of their design. A weather app lets you do that wherever you are, whenever you like. With wild weather across the country, particularly hurricanes threatening coastal states, it's a good idea to check the forecast or radar for upcoming conditions. A good weather app helps you decide if you'll need to bring an umbrella to work, or prepare for more serious conditions. One of the most important tools for that is a mobile weather app. A little playfulness, a little mystery has got me firing this thing up every few hours, and once it's fired up, it's hard not to be drawn in.When Mother Nature is in a bad mood (which is more likely than ever these days thanks to climate change), it helps to keep an eye on what's happening in the sky. ![]() The upshot of all this stuff - the app has achievements too - is that I've started to find the weather even more interesting than I already did. You go on a hunch and then refine it from there. I had an extremely cryptic landmark clue the other day, but I still managed to track it down in a matter of minutes. You press and hold a finger on the screen and it does a radar scan that indicates, in essence, how hot or cold you are with respect to this landmark you're looking for. ![]() But even if you don't know where it is, the app has this neat way of leading you. An early one was for the White House: not that tricky. ![]() If you know where the landmark is, great. Every now and then it gives you a clue about a landmark and you have to go and hunt it down. Secret Locations adds a layer of gameiness to everything. The map is wonderful: you can swipe around the world and see storms flocking in real-time. Secret Locations is a means of getting you to mess around with the app's world map, I suspect. My favourite thing about it so far - okay, second favourite yesterday it told me it was going to rain in a minute and a minute later it actually did - is a feature called Secret Locations. The AI calls me meatbag and is generally mean about everything, and the app is filled with funny little details and asides and hidden features. The idea, I gather, is that Carrot Weather is a weather app powered by a quirky AI. It has a slider for "personality" tucked away in a settings menu, and the slider came set to "homicidal." Also, within about an hour of owning the app, it had made a reference to a very recent tweet from Donald Trump. I got a new weather app for my phone the other day, because I am middle-aged now and have decided, accordingly, that the weather is interesting. ![]()
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