Joel Carlton: Graphic Designer | Greenville, SC

My Weather Mobile is one of the best iPhone weather applications I have used so far. I have used Apple’s built in weather application but it is more like a widget then a full application. Apple’s weather does not provide enough information to be a one stop application for me. Weather Bug has been what I have had to use up till now; I like the fact it has a radar viewer and severe weather warnings.

My Weather stands above these other two applications because of its rich content. It has nice colorful menus that are easy to see and very pleasing to the eye. My Weather does not just stop at the eye candy; it actually has lots of features and that is what I want, lots of features.

Every-time you open My Weather Mobile you are presented with a notification to use location services to find local weather. This can be annoying if you want home, school or work instead of local weather.  (I will explain locations later). Since 2.1 Apple has taken away location privileges from applications so now you must leave the application (directly or click settings on the pop up dialog), enable location and come back. FYI, if you decline to turn on location, the default My Weather location will always be N/A, and there is no way to assign it to a location. Assuming you turn on location, it will then display your current local weather. (If you do not want to use location refer to the end of this review where I cover adding locations.)

The default screen is a list of your locations list; Tapping the > at the far right of the location will display more information such as temperature, heat index, dew point, humidity, precipitation, wind, and pressure. There is also a picture of the current weather state as well as its description.

Under location or more info is forecast, trends, and radar. Forecast shows up to nine days with a picture and word description, as well as high and low temperature. There are no descriptions should you choose to click a day. This might be a disappointment if you look forward to reading the daily forecast, but if you look at the information in trends it might be considered redundant.

Clicking on trends will bring you to the default view of temperature and sky conditions. You can swipe through various hours of the day by taping an hour and dragging your finger left or right. You can only view up to twelve hours in increments of two hours. If you turn the iPhone or iPod Touch sideways My Weather will go into landscape mode and display a longer graph with more then one day. I love this feature but I would like to see the actual sunrise and sunset, as well as an option to view the day in one-hour increments.

A simple swipe left on the graph will bring up precipitation. This graph can be viewed in the same ways as temperature. Precipitation graph displays the amount of rain or snowfall due at a specific time of the day.

One more swipe to the left will bring up the final trend: wind. The wind graph will display wind speed as well as direction.

The next major feature of My Weather Mobile is radar. Even though the radar is small it utilizes multi touch; Users can pinch and expand as well as moved the radar in any direction. If you have used Google Maps on iPhone or iPod Touch then you should be familiar with how radar will work. If you rotate to the horizontal position you will be presented with full screen radar. Weather radar will only show up in the US but you can view map data anywhere on the globe since My Weather uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. I find that radar takes a while to load due to all the map detail, and I would be happy if My Weather offered some sort of opacity control as well as map detail. Google Maps has satellite imagery but it also has a fast loading graphical map. Radar works great on WiFi and 3G due to their speed but it is slow on Edge.

Now we get to the part of the review were we add locations. My Weather will let you add up to 10,000 US cities but ironically enough there is no option to add a location by zip code. I don’t mind as much because of the cool address book feature.

The address book feature is one of the features that makes this application stand out from the rest. Click the address book tab and type in a name to search for contacts to add. Once you find a business or individual, click the name to see the location details. Unfortunately, if you try to rename the location or name My Weather Mobile will erase the whole title forcing you to retype it in. Click “Done” to have the application add the location based on its longitude and latitude. Longitude and latitude is the most accurate way to add a location.

I live in a large city where weather on one side is rarely the same as the other (sunny here, raining their). No other weather application I have used was able to solve this problem. My Weather Mobile lets me view the weather conditions at my house and lets me see how much rain I can expect when I go out biking across town.

Some of the features I would like added in future versions of My Weather Mobile are:
1. A humidity chart; There is a chart for sun, rain, and wind; I can’t see it being that much harder to add one for humidity.
2. Show the actual sunrise and sunset on the sun chart or another chart.
3. Show less map detail in the radar or at least an option so maps load faster.
4. An option to show trends in one-hour increments.
5. Severe weather notifications (not sure if this is already included; I have not had any bad weather yet).

This is just about a one-stop application for me; I absolutely love it. I have had to use Weather Bug and weather.com for all my needs; Now I can use this application for nearly everything and weather.com for sunset times and hourly humidity charts. I would love to ditch weather.com and solely rely on My Weather Mobile.

If you care about the weather enough to buy an application when there are free options, then I would absolutely recommend this one; It has lots information and many ways to view it.

For more opinion read Scott Kleinberg’s review. “5 Out of 5 Stars: MyWeather has Sunny Future”