1Weather (for Android)

[#DEXTER]

Though 1Weather bills itself as the most aesthetically pleasing weather app, that doesn't mean it's not informative and packed with data. In fact, it managed to cram more information into its main page than the nerdy Editors' Choice Weather Underground. On the maps main screen you'll find visibility, barometric pressure, humidity, wind speed/direction, UV index, dew point, temperature, and chance of precipitation. Each has an accompanying glyph, and there's a handy explanation for each measurement when you tap it. Very nice.

Swiping right pulls up more displays for extended forecasts, hourly and extended forecasts in symbols, chance of precipitation for the week, an animated map, phases of the moon, and time of sunrise and sunset. With the exception of the radar map and text-based forecasts, each display is carefully rendered with clever icons. For example, an inverted umbrella indicates no chance of rain and an eyeball is shorthand for visibility. I wasn't able to get 1Weather to display tomorrow's sunrise and sunset times, however.

My favorite design flourish is found on the extended and hourly forecast page, where you slide your finger back and forth across a graph to get the forecast for a particular time or day. High and low temperatures share a graph with bars indicating the chance of precipitation. At a glance, you can see a day's or a week's worth of information, or you can drill down for the specifics. It's a deft way of displaying a lot of information.

Like most weather apps, 1Weather has radar map with plenty of layers you can toggle on and off. I was surprised to see various disasters as overlays, so you can see nearby fires in addition to the usual radar, clouds, temperature, and so on.

I really like how 1Weather handles locations, keeping them tucked into a collapsed left rail. You can search and see an overview of your favorite locations, making the app a handy travel companion.

1Weather appears to get most of its data from the National Weather Service. Weather Underground also draws from the same source but augments it with data from thousands of home weather stations and even user reports.

Design, Design, Design

1Weather is all about looking good, and overall it succeeds. But the app is still just a framework for data drawn from forecast providers, and sometimes the data from all the disparate sources doesn't quite mesh together just right. For example, the text forecasts are huge blocks of words that are sometimes unreadable against the Creative Commons licensed images the app uses as backgrounds. Also, those images look a bit low-res and cheesy against 1Weather's fancy fonts and icons. Thankfully, the app has several appearance settings which let you address some of these issues.

Another problem with the design is that, on occasion, customizing it seems to make the app unstable. I experienced an unfortunate number of crashes on my Samsung Galaxy S4 Active when attempting to change the app's look. After changing my theme from "live weather" to "space," the app crashed three times before it successfully launched.

It's also a bit surprising that, for an app as design-centric as 1Weather, a lot of the information is repetitious. For example, by the time you get to the precipitation page, you've already seen the exact same information two or three times. That's the difference between good art design and good user-experience design. I liked how Weather Underground lets me reorder some of the sections like moon phases or extended forecasts to avoid this sort of problem.

Widgets
Most people will probably prefer to get their weather information from handy widgets than from big hulking apps, and 1Weather has widgets to spare. The app comes preloaded with six widgets of varying shapes and sizes. Each lets you choose a theme and a specific location, so you can customize them to your heart's content.

My two favorites are the info-packed circular widget and the long strip widget that shows a week's worth of extended forecast data. The first occupies a 2-by-2 slot on your Android home screen and the other takes up 4 by 2.

Weather Underground has fewer widgets, but they need fewer tweaks to look and work how I want them to. Weather Underground also has a large radar map widget and tiny 1-by-1 weather data widgets. 1Weather also puts weather info into your notification tray and notification bar, but Weather Underground is both more useful and artful in this particular area.

Partly Cloudy
1Weather delivers on its promise of simple, beautiful design. It has some foibles, but they are easily rectified with a little fiddling in the settings. I'd actually like to see the developers go further in future versions, perhaps letting users remove panes they don't care for. The sheer number of widgets will make anyone happy, but the reliance on royalty-free images and the crashing I experienced gives me pause.

I really like the 1Weather Android app, but I feel like its aesthetics took precedence over information and ease of use. The app brings a lot of good design to the table, but it takes a back seat to our Editors' Choice Android weather app, Weather Underground.