I walk for about an hour every day. Which means, if I don’t want to get rain-soaked occasionally, I’d better know when the storms are coming.
That involved a lot of guesswork and inference on my part. I’d look at the hourly report on weather.com and pull up the live radar on wunderground.com. It wasn’t perfect, but it mainly worked.
Until now. Because I just discovered my new best weather friend: Dark Sky.
Dark Sky is an iPhone and iPad app that does one thing very well: It tells me whether it will rain (or, I assume, snow) where I am standing (or walking or running or biking) right now and, if so, for how long.
That, my friends, is hyperlocal news. Relevant and extremely local.
The team behind Dark Sky has a great blog post that explains how it all works, but like most great ideas expressed simply, all you need to really know is that it just works.
Four bucks. Boom. Purchased.
If you have any ongoing desire to know when and how much it’s going to rain, I suggest you take a look at Dark Sky and consider adding it to your iPhone. And, if you’re in the business of creating anything that you dare call “hyperlocal,” consider the effect an app like Dark Sky has on users who see it, get it and feel no hesitation in buying/supporting it.
Rain photo by mytimemachine (Parry) on flickr. Creative Commons.