Another app that received a major overhaul in iOS 7 was the Weather app. The card-style design of the app has been stripped away, leaving in its place a lovely translucent UI with weather images in the background. It’s about time Apple updated Weather, as the basic, boxy design has been around since the first iPhone debuted in 2007.
UI
The Weather app is now a full-screen app that allows Apple to fit additional weather data on the screen without making everything cluttered. The background is dynamic and changes based on the time of day and the weather conditions. It’s a subdued background that is attractive on your screen and doesn’t scream “look at me.” To me, this is a good thing as it’s the weather data that I want, not some vibrant pictures. The Weather app resembles the Yahoo Weather app, which is delightfully ironic as Yahoo provides the weather data for Apple.
Features
When the app launches, the first thing you see are the current weather conditions and the temperature, which occupy the top third of the screen (as shown above). The rest of the screen is split between the hourly forecast, the weekly forecast and the settings at the bottom.
This isn’t all there is to the app. Tapping or swiping on the weather data brings up additional information. For example, you can tap on the current temperature and view other weather parameters like humidity, chance of rain, wind speed and direction and the “feels like” temperature. Like its predecessors, the app supports multiple locations (shown above), which are added by tapping on the settings icon in the bottom-right corner, hitting the “+” button and then typing in the location information.
Conclusion
The new Weather app looks great and performs great, but its feature set lags behind its competitors. Notably absent are niceties like radar, photos and webcams. Don’t get me wrong — I love what Apple did here, and I use the Weather app in a pinch, but I still prefer apps such as WeatherBug and the new Perfect Weather.
iOS 7: Weather app is easy on the eyes, still lacking features originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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