Outside

Outside is a beautiful weather application from Robocat. When you compare the features of the default weather app with Outside, the results speak for themselves.

Let’s just face it, the Apple app is not exactly up to par. It shows a confusing image demonstrating the current weather, and is missing crucial information such as wind chill and speed. Outside trumps it in almost every way, and is definitely worth getting. What makes Outside unique is that it does it’s job well while looking great. The app displays the data in a refined and useful way, and will change to match your weather.

When you launch the application, you receive a cute animation of spinning raindrops while a piece of parchment says something quaint like “Building World”, “Asking the Weatherman”, or “Checking the Thermostat.”  Shaking your device at any time while using the app refreshes. When Outside finishes downloading your information, a window opens onto the scene of a tree on a hill. The tree may be bare, or maybe have orange leaves, depending on the weather. Above it floats some text, showing the current temperature, and below that, the “feels like” temperature. In cold weather, the text frosts over and drips icicles, while in hot areas, they sweat and turn red. If there are high winds, leaves will blow across the landscape in the actual wind direction the data reports, at differing speeds, swirling across the landscape. If it’s snowing, flakes fall thickly from the sky, while a snowman appears. Raindrops will even fall and splash onto the ground. In the top left, there is a tiny calendar resembling the default, except this one shows a relative time, such as “5m ago”, representing the time since the weather information was refreshed. Swiping the screen left will move into the forecast area, where you can see the predicted weather for the next 6 days, including today. Just swipe back, or tap on the calendar, to return to the current date.

Swiping down on any day will change the view to one of the sky, which will of course be light, or dark, or cloudy depending on the weather, and it shows a whole bunch of information about the day, such as UV index, humidity, dew point, and the predicted weather, be it Clear,  Mostly Cloudy,  Rainy, or  Ice. The sunrise and sunset times, the percentage of cloud cover, wind speed and direction,  estimated precipitation,  and wind chill are all right there,  just a swipe away.

At the bottom of the screen are three objects, a cup of coffee, an alarm clock, and a few books. These are the Home, Notifications, and Preferences screens respectively. The Notifications screen allows the setting of custom push notifications for various weather conditions, another area where Outside shines. The options are Rain, T-shirt Weather, Cold, UV, and Snow. There are options to specify various preferences and thresholds like how cold it has to be before it’s considered cold enough for a push notification. The push notifications are a pay to use service, and must be extended through In-App Purchases. Currently the payment options for those pushes are  £0.59/$.99 for 90 days of notification, and  £1.19/$1.99 for 300 days. This is dirt cheap, and I feel it is worth it, however the app functions perfectly well without a push subscription. Regardless, Outside comes with 30 days of push built in, so you can decide for yourself.

The Preferences panel let’s you change various settings, such as your location and the preferred degree unit. Here is where you can see the current end date of your push notification subscription, and purchase more if you like. The only missing feature I can find is an inability to have more than one location selected at a time,  I hope they add this option in a future update.  Speaking of updates, Robocat has done a great job keeping track of errors and adding features in a timely manner, something we always love to see.

The thought put into the entire application is stunning, and I commend Robocat for such a great app. It has a great, persistent UI with a cute new way to look at the weather, the push notifications are useful and custom, it’s extremely reliable, and I just love it to pieces. To quote the AppStore description: “Outside is a visual weather forecast with custom push notification like you’ve never seen before.”