Contrast and Agile Tortoise, the developers behind popular apps Launch Center Pro and Drafts, respectively, have teamed up to introduce a new weather app called Weather Atlas.
Weather Atlas has been developed from the ground up with the unreleased "iPhone 8" in mind, and it is meant to take advantage of the device's taller display. It also incorporates iOS 11-style design elements like bolder text and crisp, simple icons, and bottom-focused app controls, so it'll fit right in on Apple's upcoming 2017 devices.
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The app has also been built to take advantage of all of the latest functionality in the iOS operating system, so it also supports features like Split View on the iPad Pro.
Meant to offer up a wealth of information in a single glance, Weather Atlas features both hourly weather and 10-day forecasts overlaid on a map with standard radar and cloud layers so you can check the temperature and see weather patterns at the same time. The 10-day forecast features prospective highs and lows along with precipitation, wind speed, and sunrise and sunset.
The hourly forecast for a single day displays the hourly temperature, humidity, wind speed, and cloud cover along with precipitation.
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Multiple locations are supported, so you can see the weather across several cities, and there are built-in weather warnings for your location. There's an option to see the weather patterns on the map over time, and tools for customizing the look of the app and sharing weather forecasts in other apps. Warning layers can be set to provide additional data on thunderstorms and tornados, wind, winter conditions like blizzard warnings, hurricanes, fire, floods, fog, and more.
Weather Atlas is a free app and it is supported by ads, so there are some somewhat intrusive ads at the top of the app and when looking at a full 10-day weather forecast. Removing the ads requires a Pro account, priced at $0.49 per month or $4.99 per year. A Pro account includes support for different themes, extra widgets, improved maps, and of course, no ads.
For the time being, Weather Atlas is only available in the United States, but it may expand to other countries in the future.
Weather Atlas can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
To use the API for pulling data from either DarkSky ('https://darksky.net/dev') or WeatherUnderground ('https://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/') costs the developer money on an ongoing basis, unless they have extremely low volume (on the order of 1 request for info for 1 location every 5-15 minutes, completely unrealistic for an app being used by thousands of people in hundreds of cities - and merely scraping data from the DS or WU websites would break ToS and get blocked). DarkSky and WeatherUnderground both aggregate data from thousands of sources, giving them the ability to do good "hyperlocal" forecasts. Alternatively the developers could poll a few government sites directly (for free) and give results that are less accurate than many of their competitors (who are using DS and WU), or build their own weather aggregation backend, like DarkSky did, but that's an enormous amount of work (not just developing the system, and storing the data, but securing agreements to access all those data sources), and, arguably, would be needless duplication of effort.