More Chilly Weather Improvements

2022-05-17 | #weather #cgi | @Acidus

I made a few improvements to Chilly Weather, my Gemini weather service that uses emoji to present a more readable interface.

⛄️ Chilly Weather: A Gemini weather service

I added "Rest of Today" line which shows the high, low, and chance of precipitation for the rest of the current day. This way you don't have to skim the Hourly section. I only show this if there are more than 4 hours left in the day.

I added sunrise and sunset times, displayed inline inside the Hourly section's chronology.

I fixed a bug in the Hourly section where Chilly would show a ☀️ emoji if the weather status was "clear" even if that hour was in the middle of the night. Now we track whether its daytime or night time, and use a 🌕 moon emoji when its clear at night.

Other plans

As soon as you start showing a moon, there are going to be people that want to be sure you are showing the right phase. Today I spend 20 minutes reading all about the 8 phases of the moon, and won't you know it, there are emoji's for all of them:

🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

This might be something I consider. It's also cool to know when a full moon is coming, but I don't want to complicate the UI. Perhaps I should add a moon phases endpoint?

I would like to improve the "Now" and "Rest of Day" sections. Really what you want is a textual summary: "Mostly cloud, 65°F to 75°F, 40% chance of afternoon showers." This is what Dark Sky and other awesome apps do.

Finally, weather warnings. Things like "Tornado watch" or "High Winds warning." The API I'm using supplies these. The challenge is they are often verbose. Some of these formats appear to date from the days of TELEX and come as ALL CAPS WHICH MAKES THEM GROSS AND HARD TO READ.

As always, feedback is welcome about ways to improve Chilly Weather.