Dark Sky 4.0 Update


I've got a thing for weather apps and purchased a lot of them. When Dark Sky was released it had a nifty feature of notifying you when it was about to rain. It was locations specific, of course. It also had a cool precipitation predictor to give you a practical visual on not only the chance of rain for your immediate location, but the intensity. It also works for snow. Often when it storms, I'll flip this open to if the app calls the medium or heavy percip.

Version 4.0 was released this week and it's a major overhaul. I've been having some fun playing around with it. My only complaint is it seems to have lost unique feel in exchange for turning into an iOS 7 app. That's not to say it doesn't look nice, it just now looks like a lot of other apps. The radar map on the old version never really sat well with me. I just didn't like, perhaps because it was such a departure from the traditional green blob maps. And it had limited panning. I like the new radar map better and it has an interesting curved look for the globe as you zoom out. The map also incorporates temperature, which is interesting to see vs just the typical temps in major cities. It also now provides more weather data, essentially becoming more than the original precipitation predictor.

Usually I have Dark Sky tucked away in a folder and bring it up when needed. The new update makes it a contender for my main weather app.

The major upgrade is free to existing users and otherwise sells for $3.99.