I think I first heard about the smartphone weather app Dark Sky on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog about five-10 years ago (closer to the latter).

He was pretty enthusiastic about it, so I checked it out at their then site Forcast.io (now resolves to Darksky.net).

Looked good, so I downloaded the app to my iPhone 4s – I think it was $4.99, but whatever.

Instant favorite.

Some folks raved about the radar penal, which attempted to show, though a series of images, the past, present and future radar. Pretty cool, because you could see if the rain was about to end or whatever. Slick. Accurate? I can’t recall.

To me, what made this a killer app was the hourly breakdowns when you drilled into a day.

Most weather apps at the time were “High of X, Low of Y, Z% chance of rain or snow.”

With the hourly drill-down, you could see when precipitation was supposed to start or stop. Sure, 90% chance of rain, but won’t start until 10pm or so. Can still do those after-work chores and not worry about getting soaked.

Game changer, to me.

Apple thought so, too – they purchased the company in March 2020 – and the Android app was shut down August 2020. Apple started porting pieces of Dark Sky into the native iOS app..

And at midnight, Jan. 31, 2022, the iOS app became obsolete.

Now it’s the Apple weather app – which has improved.

Still sad – I’d grown fond of Dark Sky.

Dark Sky had another, less heralded feature: It had an API, a nice light JSON API that was a simple call (with key & lat/log) to get a JSON file that one could extract whatever one wanted from the pretty detailed file.

I used it on Geistlinger.com’s top page, in the right-hand rail. I loaded it with my home weather, and a link to toggle between Weather Now (top box) and Weather Details (bottom box) of current conditions (AJAX calls).

The API is going away shortly, as well (March 31, 2023).

Apple, however, is offering an API replacement (still free for light users like me), but it’s a little more hard-core. I haven’t pulled that data yet (have to go through and official Apple Dev account blah blah. I’ll get to it eventually).