Yahoo has launched a new weather app for Android which provides forecasts-at-a-glance, current weather conditions, and weather-related photos from Flickr.

The photos are a nice touch which gives the app an attractive, ever-changing look that sets it apart from other weather apps. The home screen shows current conditions and a brief forecast in portrait mode — and when you tilt your phone to landscape you get more details such as the sunrise, sunset, barometric pressure, humidity level and wind speed.

You can also add additional locations and switch between locations by swiping left or right. There’s also a new widget that lets you place a weather photo on your home screen and view the current weather conditions.

But there are a few quirks that make the Yahoo Weather app rather odd.

The home screen shows you cute little icons that lets you know whether it’ll be partly sunny or mostly cloudy, I suppose, but there’s nothing that tells how likely it is to rain on a given day.

If you want to view an extended forecast, the app dumps you out to the Yahoo Weather page in a web browser. There’s also no way to see any forecast details at all from the home screen widget.

Considering the fact that Yahoo powers the weather widget that comes with iOS, you’d think that the company would have figured out by now what it takes to make a good mobile weather app. Unfortunately the Yahoo Weather app for Android falls far short.

It’s available as a free download from the Android Market if you want to try it for yourself.

BlackBerry app developer Bellshare is working on its first Android app. It’s called BeWeather and it’s an attractive, customizable weather application.

BeWeather offers a series of home screen widgets that you can use to see the current temperature at a glance or get a full 5-day forecast. Widgets are available in sizes ranging from 1×1 to 4×3.

When you fire up the full app, the background is filled with attractive animations that change depending on current conditions, while the app shows the time, current temperature, and other information including humidity, wind speed, and what temperature it “feels like” when you take wind chill, heat index, or other factors into account.
Read the rest of this entry »

There are plenty of home screen widgets for Google Android that will show you weather forecasts for the next few days at a glance. But few will give you detailed forecasts for the next 24 hours. Aix Weather Widget does just that.

The free widget shows a graph on your home screen with the estimated temperatures for the next 24 hours. You can also see the current te,[eratire and relative humidity.

You can choose how frequently the graph is updated, select whether to show temperatures in Fahrenheit or Celsius, and adjust the colors used in the widget. That’s about it for the settings now, but the developer says a future version will also let you adjust the time periods for the forecast so you can see more than just the next day’s weather if you like.

Any weather app for Android worth its salt includes a home screen widget that can let you see the current temperature and other conditions without launching the full app. But Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch don’t support widgets, so most iOS weather apps just show you a cute picture of a sun and you have to actually load the app to see anything else.

But one developer has figured out a way to show you the current temperature on your home screen — by using the iPhone notification system. Instead of showing you how may instant messages or friend requests are waiting for you, Fahrenheit sends an alert with the current temperature.

Read the rest of this entry »

Beautiful Widgets is a popular Android suite of widgets which let you dress up your phone’s home screen with customizable clock and weather widgets. Tapping on a widget also brings up a forecast view with attractive animations.

So far Beautiful Widgets has only really been optimized for smartphones, but the developer has released a public beta of a new version which supports the Motorola XOOM and other tablets with high resolution displays. There’s a new larger clock widget, and when you tap to bring up a forecast, the weather animation will take up the full screen.

Beautiful Widgets 3.5 beta isn’t available from the Android Market, but the developer posted a download link for an installer. The beta expires in five days.

via Droid Life

MIUI Developers have released a free weather app for Android. It’s still just a beta, but it’s already one of the best looking weather apps I’ve seen with attractive high resolution graphics for full screen views and home screen widgets. The app also has a few unusual features such as the ability to share your weather info with friends.

Unfortunately, the app is fairly large and resource intensive and for now you need to manually copy the .apk file to your system/apps directory. That means you can’t easily install the app unless you have a rooted phone.

You can find more information, photos, and download links at xda-developers and at the MIUI Weather page.

via Android Police

When you search for “weather” on Google using a mobile browser, you’ll now get a nifty new local forecast as the top of your search results. By default, the web app will grab your current location, but you can also choose other locations from a drop-down box.

In addition to showing you today’s weather as well as forecasts for the rest of the week, there’s a slider that you can move along to get hour-by-hour forecast results. As you change your position on the slider, the temperature, humidity, and wind-speed should all update, so you can get a sense of whether it will be as frigid tonight as it is right now.

The background of the app will also change from day to night and back again as you drag the slider.

The new weather search view should show up if you’re using Google’s English user interface. Support for other languages is still in the works.

Scanner Radio is an Android app that lets you listen to live police radio, fire radio, and weather radio as well as amateur radio streams from around the world. There are over 2,000 channels available.

Scan to download

The app grabs the internet streams for these police scanners and other radio channels, so there may be a slight delay. But you can click the “Scanners near me” button from the home screen to find local streams. Or you can choose the top 50 scanners. It turns out that the Chicaco Police radio stream is one of the most popular, and for good reason. There’s a lot more chatter on that station than the Philadelphia scanners I tried at first.

For the most part, I find listening to police radio to be as much fun as watching paint dry, but if you tune in long enough you might find some real drama unfolding in real-time, or get some information that can help you avoid an accident on your evening commute.

Scanner Radio is available as a free download from the Android Market. There’s also an ad-free Pro version available.

via reddit