Best weather webapp for the iPhone
May 5, 2008 at 9:03 AM by Dr. Drang
A few days ago, I wrote a post describing a little webapp I’d written that scraped a National Weather Service page to deliver a detailed text forecast to the iPhone. The next morning, I saw that @dsandler had Twittered that night about a Weather Underground service that did the same thing. And more.
The iPhone-optimized page is i.wund.com, and it provides
- Current conditions: temperature, wind, humidity, visibility
- Sun and moon rise and set times
- A radar image of your area
- Forecasts for the next several days
- Severe weather warnings
- A search field to get the weather for another city
Some of this is information that could be scraped from the NWS, and I had been thinking about improving my webapp by adding the current conditions and a search field. But there’s no reason for me to go any further; the Weather Underground page gives me everything I want in a compact, fast-loading package. I’ve bookmarked the page for Naperville and added an icon for it to my home screen. Had I known of i.wund.com earlier, I never would have bothered to develop my webapp. At least I learned a bit about Beautiful Soup.
You might wonder why I didn’t learn about the Weather Underground webapp before starting to develop my own. It is, after all, on Apple’s page for popular weather applications. Well, the sad fact is that I’ve been disappointed by so many of the webapps listed on Apple’s iPhone pages that I’ve gotten out of the habit of looking there first. I guess I should get back into the habit.
