Neven Mrgan: Redundant data in the Weather app
If you’re a serious weather junkie, you might use a special weather app to get your daily klimate kick. And if you’re Edward Tufte, you might think the iPhone weather app is “a bit thin”. Me, I don’t mind it - it’s a nice, big dashboard view of the weather features I care most about.
But here’s something crazy: the app shows the same exact data twice. Look:
Today’s high and low predictions (44/41) are shown below the city name, and then again in the day list. They’re the same exact numbers, always.
The best explanation for why this is so comes from Geoff Pado: because the weather widget in Mac OS X shows it that way. And the widget does so because you can collapse it. See:
Of course, it’s possible that there’s some other, more rational explanation. I’d love to hear it, but Geoff’s guess sounds right to me.
So, this would ideally be fixed. And it would make room for a feature I’d really like to see in every weather widget, on the phone or TV or wherever:yesterday’s weather. The point would be to give me some indication of how much cooler/warmer I should expect to feel as compared to yesterday. See, I don’t really know how to judge absolute temperature values. Which coat do I grab at 55º? How about 43º? If, however, I knew that it would be 8º cooler than the previous day, I could act appropriately.
