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Chilly Weather: Streamlined Gemini weather service

2022-03-21 | #weather #cgi

Today I'm releasing Chilly Weather, a service that returns the current weather in a fun and streamlined way:

⛄️ Chilly Weather: A Gemini weather service

Here is what it looks like for me:

Chilly Weather Forecast

@Gluon has an existing Weather service that I've been using, but I found it wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I built Chilly Weather. Even though we are both leveraging OpenWeather's API, the services look pretty different. And that's OK, because weather can be so personal (See below).

Gluon's weather service

Features:

Shows current weather, next 24 hours forecast, and next 7 days forecast
Clear, simple presentation, prioritizing (what I think is) the most important weather data
Uses Emoji *and* a description to represent weather conditions. Because "🌤" is more skimmable than "Scattered cloudy"
No need to search. Chilly uses your client's IP to geolocate you, and looks up the weather from there.
No need to select the metric, or displaying both Fahrenheit and Celcius. Chilly uses the country you are in to decide the units to display.

(That last feature shouldn't be construed as me approving of displaying temperatures as Celsius. It is a garbage scale for human-range temperatures. But if you must use it, Chilly will let you be depraved 😜)

The code for Chilly Weather is open source:

Chilly Weather

CGI wrapper + Gemini formatting

Why build a weather service?

While Gemini doesn't have many weather services, most platforms do. I think there are so many because weather can be so personal. Do you care about barometric pressure? Personally I don't, unless it's dropping, indicating a storm or weather front coming in. But even then I don't care, I just want to be told if/when it will start raining or how the temperature will be changing. What about humidity. Often not, but I live in the Southern US, where it can get crazy humid, making the heat worse. So actually I probably really don't care about humidity, beyond how it changes what it "feels like" the temperature is.

All this data, and more, is available via OpenWeather. So the challenge isn't necessarily getting the data, its displaying it. A constrained environment like Gemini can also make this tricky. Given the wide range of weather emoji Gemini's lack of inline images wouldn't be an issue.

I ended up taking a lot of inspiration from one of the Dark Sky complications for the Apple Watch. Dark Sky on a watch does a great job expressing weather data when space is at a premium, without needing too many strange layouts:

Dark Sky Apple Watch #1

Dark Sky Apple Watch #2

Feedback wanted!

I want you feedback! How can I make Chilly better? Some things I already want to add:

Location Search (so you can see weather for other places, or if the IP-to-location is incorrect)
Adopt "Feels like" temperature instead of absolute.

Try ⛄️ Chilly Weather Now