Weather Doodle Review

There's nothing incredibly sexy about the weather, other than the hope of a cold, rainy day and a nice fire in the fireplace. For simple weather purposes, most people find that the built in Apple weather app is more than adequate. It provides the temperature, a visual representation of how clear (or unclear) the sky is, and a 7-day weather forecast all on the same page. The style is fairly sterile, but the nice shades of blue offset by the warm yellow sun look quite nice on the black background.

Not one to conform, Tiny Mammal has released their own weather app based around design rather than advanced function, and hopes to beat Apple at its own game. Those folks at Apple know what they are dong though, and it'll be awfully tough to sway people away from their more than adequate app.

Like the standard app, weather doodle gives only basic weather information. If you are looking for barometric pressure and the heat index, you should probably stop reading and look elsewhere. The only unique piece of info that Weather Doodle gives you is the humidity, which is nice to know over the sticky summer months. The real claim to fame here is the animated doodle background that replaces Apple's simple icon representation of the weather. There are also additional background types that you can buy via in app purchase, but the standard one is quite nice.

The real difference maker between the two apps though is speed. The weather is great and all, and I'd rather look at something that isn't ugly, but I prefer my weather to come quickly. With Apple's app I can get the weather and a 7-day forecast in about a second. With Weather Doodle, the weather and the forecast are on different pages, and it takes about 6-8 seconds (on my iPhone4) for the app to display my data.

At the end of the day, Weather Doodle is pretty, but it's certainly not pretty enough to overcome the simplicity and speed advantage that the Apple app has. If you really dislike the Apple app, or have an unusually strong need to know the humidity, you should pick up Weather Doodle ASAP. For the rest of us though, the Apple weather app will do just fine.