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Show HN: Beautiful intuitive weather forecasts that don't rely on numbers/units (leftium.com)
4 points by Leftium 24 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments
- Visualize weather metrics via space and colors

- Compare current/future conditions with weather you experienced the day before

- Understand/compare how conditions change throughout the day

---

WeatherSense started out as a hand-coded project: https://github.com/Leftium/weather-sense

- Would you consider this project a good example of how AI can be used to enhance coding?

- Claude helped implement many new features from the backlog, like 60-min precipitation forecasts

- Claude helped add some whimsical features: I only considered adding because AI experimentation is cheap:

* "Calm mode:" truly emphasizes how WeatherSense doesn't need numbers by removing/replacing all numbers from UI

* Dynamic background color based on sun angle (time + location)

---

Major inspirations:

- DarkSky

- MerrySky (https://merrysky.net)



It is not beautiful for me on Mobile


Can you clarify? Is the rendering broken on mobile?

I just checked, and the responsive layout seems to render correctly on Android Firefox/Chrome and iOS Safari.

You can even save WeatherSense to your home screen as a simple progressive web app.


I don't like the color scheme with the gradients; nothing functionally wrong, just my reaction.


The gradients actually serve a purpose:

- You can see the weekly high/low temperature trends by scanning down vertically along the left.

- Redder color means warmer; bluer means cooler.

- The gradient is constant for all data plots, so you can visually compare the temperature across days and hours.

- The gradient block for each day goes from the high to the low temp for that day.

- Even the hourly temperature plot line is calibrated to the same gradient.

---

The sky background gradient is slightly superfluous, but it's very subtle and meant to emulate (a more vibrant) version of the actual sky.

For anyone who wants more gradients: there's a setting here: https://weather-sense.leftium.com/wmo-codes

I disabled those by default because they were distracting and didn't serve a purpose.


Any way to change units? My location uses the metric system.


There is a unit toggle button right below the day tiles. Your selection should be persisted across page loads.

- You can also tap any unit to toggle.

- But the main point of WeatherSense is to transcend units ^^


[flagged]


The numbers are still there (unless "calm" mode is enabled.) You can scrub any of the plots to get the precise values for the metrics at that time.

The colors + space simply help you understand the numbers better.

(Weather forecast precision is artificial "because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands"[1])

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46570599




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