Favorite Four: Weather Watching Apps For Spring
Whether you chalk it up to climate change or not, it's been one heck of a strange winter. Now it's March, notorious for its leonine bitter entry and mild sheepish departure. With everything else turned on its head, who knows what's in store as we make our annual seasonal transition. We've put together our favorite four iOS weather apps to keep you informed of what's coming your way as we bid goodbye to old man winter.
AccuWeather for iPhone
From AccuWeather.com comes a feature rich app which bears the same name. Accuweather for iPhone provides local and international hourly and 15-day forecasts with radar animations, satellite imagery and storm warnings. Cool features include Pin Location for tracking friends and family, social media griping, er, sharing on Twitter and Facebook and all kinds of special health and lifestyle forecast categories ranging from allergy and arthritis reports to dog walking and early golf course conditions. The app's sleek utilitarian design takes maximum advantage of iOS 5's best features too. From iCloud support to Notification Center and calendar integration, this app does it all. An iPad version is also available, but it gets less enthusiastic user reviews.
AccuWeather: Weather Alerts
FREE!
$0.99
Weather+
Presently on sale to celebrate the end of winter, Weather+ is a universal app that wows critics and users. This app balances function and design with something near perfection. According to the developers every worldwide weather station is included, and the app serves up five-day forecasts for them all with stunning fullscreen video. Along with the basics this app gives users wind direction and speed information along with the humidity index, and rain and snowfall expectations. The app includes a gorgeous old-school flip-style alarm clock and swipe gestures switch locations with ease.
Weather+
$3.99
Magical Weather
Optimized for the big iPad display and meant to be left running to show off its good looks, Magical Weather is still feature-packed. Along with the visual representations of 16 weather conditions it has daily, even hourly, forecasts for up to nine of two million locations world-wide. It dishes on highs and lows, humidity, wind speeds, UV indexes and atmospheric pressure and displays in Celsius or Fahrenheit. It's eye candy to a meteorological end.
MagicalWeather
FREE!
Weather Live
Ignore that Santa's hat, Weather Live's icon and app have just been updated. This beautiful universal package is feature dense too. The app puts form first, in that it's like looking out a magic window at something akin to what's out the kitchen window. But, alongside the amazing design are current conditions and seven-day forecasts. It has the 411 on the humidex or windchill - and in March we can easily see both - with sunrise and sunset details, wind, visibility, all that good stuff. The app lets users search for locations by postal/zip code, IP, and geo-positioning and the icon has a badge indicating the current temperature. Weather Live speaks Metric and Imperial and has customizable widgets so users see as much, or as little, as they prefer.
$3.99