Partly Cloudy

Matt hails his favourite weather app, but is Dark Sky raining on its parade?

This winter, I would have been much better off with an app called Mostly Stormy to tell me the weather, but the mild optimism of Partly Cloudy’s name isn’t why it still holds a spot on my Home screen. It’s one of my go-to examples whenever we talk about the way the app revolution gives developers a way to rethink how we present information (which we do a lot, because we’re self-confessed intellectuals, and we also never tell lies in columns about weather apps).

In a small circle in the middle of the screen, Partly Cloudy manages to tell you when it will rain (and how hard), how windy it will be, how warm it will be and when it’ll get dark – all at a glance. There’s more information dotted around, but it’s brilliantly clever, making the most of the limited space on an iPhone screen. But there’s one thing missing from Partly Cloudy: rain alerts. I actually use the app, er, Rain Alerts in conjunction with Partly Cloudy to get warning for when it’s going to rain, but some of the MacFormat team have started using a different app to get everything in one: Dark Sky.

Dark Sky is extremely accurate at telling you when it will rain and for how long, sending you a little notification so you know to duck into a pub and talk about app design for a bit. Dark Sky is really designed around this idea of rain warnings, which makes it ideal for the UK – especially since it gives you timelines of when it will rain over the course of the next few days (which Partly Cloudy does too, of course). Sadly, it’s only available in the US and UK currently, but we hope it will roll out wider, powered by the Forecast.io service, which was created by the Dark Sky team especially to power its app.