The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free HTTP/JSON weather API that covers the globe. No signup required.<p><a href="https://developer.yr.no" rel="nofollow">https://developer.yr.no</a>
I learned in a meeting at my last job that many weather apps solely exist to collect and sell location data. Don’t have specific evidence but it seemed to be par for the course. So I’m glad to see this API, hopefully it’ll help more privacy focused weather apps thrive.
Looks like this is what they did with DarkSky after they acquired it. It looks awesome. It's a shame it's only available to Apple developers and users<p>Edit: my bad for skimming too fast, I'm glad there's a REST API, that's unexpected and cool!
A quiet note of appreciation for Adam Grossman, one of the co-founders of Dark Sky. It's one thing to have an idea about a weather app, quite another to pursue it successfully within a small design agency and then make it polished enough over the years to sell it to a giant corporation like Apple. Even during that acquisition, Grossman went to bat for DarkSky's users, making sure that the API was kept live (for 2+ years running now). Post-acquisition, he has evidently become comfortable enough in a corporate environment to help evangelize the API's transition to an Apple-native SDK and Swift API. The creation of the REST API with a full mapping guide means that Grossman continues to bat for DarkSky API developers. The use of the native Swift API to create brand new Apple weather apps also appears to be well done. All-in-all, it has been a remarkable journey from a small, independent agency to a large corporate while keeping core values alive, a journey where many others have flamed out. An inspiration to all. Hats off to you, Grossman!
I’m looking forward to it, but it might be a while, before I can rely on it. It’s almost certainly iOS 16 (and above)-only. I always write my apps to support (at least) one version back, at time of release.<p>I’m also interested in weather (*<|:o) or not it will be completely free to use, or if there will be some attempt to monetize (like the current Weather app takes you to that God-awful Weather Channel page, if you want anything other than a summary).<p>At least, I hope the built-in app finally becomes usable.<p><i>[UPDATED TO ADD]:<p>Looks like it’s sort of “the Google API” model (<a href="https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/get-started/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/get-started/</a>).<p>If your app isn’t that popular (like most of mine), then it’s free (with attribution).</i>
This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm.<p>I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating for someone as inexperienced as me, and (3) it allows us to get something off the ground relatively quickly.<p>Anyone have suggestions for what technologies to use, or if there are sample weather websites that we can look at and model after?<p>edit: just to clarify, I'm not talking about the tech stack for making predictions, just for the user-facing website. We have already developed an algorithm that predicts weather much more accurately than any weather website/app we've been able to find, in our local area. We are not looking outside our local area at this time.
Glad to see this released publicly! I used it internally last year, and it was frustrating but useful (mostly relating to not having access rights and quickly changing versions).
Using it in a watch complication right now to replace the low density ones that Apple provides; the native API is quite pleasant to use. Seems like they’re rapidly evolving it and dogfooding it heavily, since there’s a ton of deprecated API that seems to support internal clients, and hidden fields (AQI) that aren’t exposed yet to third party apps. Setup is a little clunky though because you have to register with them and wait a little while before they grant you access.
While I appreciate the foreseeable improvements in the native (Apple) weather app, I will sorely miss the no-nonsense UI of DarkSky.<p>It has been my go-to for years now, especially as it relates to my photography hobby. I sure hope someone steps up to replace the DarkSky experience as Apple will surely cherry pick a small subset of their core pieces to implement, likely leaving the best weather geek features on the chopping block.
It‘s the first time that I have come across the term ‚hyperlocal‘. As far as I understand in this context it means ‚high spatial and temporal resolution‘. Is that correct?<p>The Wikipedia article states that hyperlocal is used for information, which is relevant to the population of some given community. Does this always refer to a geographically defined community or has it been extended to other logical communities, as well?
It's interesting to me how people think that just because it's apple it's not still skimming your data.<p>Saying something is "privacy first" is cheap and easy. Proving it is another and we have enough evidence to support that they are not perfect on this front.<p>For my money, I'll just buy a porch thermometer and look at clouds...
I always wondered how DarkSky got that "hyperlocal" weather data. After getting into amateur radio and learning about APRS, I'm thinking they used APRS weather beacons to obtain that data. If not, it sure would be good source for very localized weather in an app.
I made my own weather app for the area I live in. NOAA makes that easy here in the U.S. so it's trivial to hack for anyone with some web skills:<p><a href="https://azartiz.com/branson/" rel="nofollow">https://azartiz.com/branson/</a>
I don't really know Swift, but does the following line from that site make any sense?<p>"And with Swift concurrency, it’s easy to request weather data with just a few lines of code."
You've got to wonder why the focus isn't on providing a seamless general Rest API experience for all services rather then having specific Swift extensions for each service.