Haze Review

Radical simplicity is something of a continuing trend in iOS apps, and Haze travels along this well-worn path of trying to provide a minimalist app that still does just enough to be useful, this time in the field of weather apps.

Granted, a weather app has the extra challenge of trying to beat the simplicity of just swiping down Notification Center and seeing what iOS is reporting as the current weather. Why should I check Haze instead of that? Well, first off, the app is incredibly stylish, with a variety of color schemes that can be used to represent the weather data.

Well, it provides plenty of the basics: temperature, humidity, highs and lows, wind, etc. There's subtle little touches, like compass support for showing which direction the wind is blowing in relative to which direction the phone is being pointed in.

The app could use with a little more in the way of explanation; the third section for precipitation doesn't exactly explain what everything is, like the percentage number, which seems like precipitation chance, but I couldn't get an exact cross-checking of that number. The rest seems obvious, like which precipitation is likely (an umbrella for rain), and how much is expected, along with humidity. The middle temperature section is fairly obvious, but the left sunshine section is a little less so; it says how much sunshine there will be that day, but not when there won't be sunshine. It doesn't really help much.

And well, that's what I have to say about this app: when I compare it to just checking the built-in weather, I don't think this provides much of an advantage. Each provides the basics, Haze looks nicer but its advanced data falls in a useless center position. It's not basic enough for me to want to use, but not advanced enough for that when I might need it, there's nothing interesting enough there.

So Haze may look nice, but it just seems like the effort would be better put into making one of the more comprehensive weather apps look a lot nicer, rather than provide a basic experience, because I can already get that.