• lxe 7 hours ago

    Cute, and with small adjustments, I'd be legitimately using this. There are just better ways to interpret things:

    1. Make the bending trees signify wind direction. Have to get creative with north and south, but a tree bent down vs out can do, and the bend or size and clustering of trees should signify magnitude of the wind.

    2. Put sunrise and sunset as literally sun over the horizon, not the sun and moon.

    3. Make the night sky shaded differently than day

    4. Don't start at "current time" but rather a fixed point, either morning or midnight, and specify the "now" via the location of the house

    • folli 5 hours ago

      All good points, agreed. Except #4, would be cute if there's some animal that moves along instead of the house.

      And perhaps playing with some kind of isometric perspective could help visualize wind directions?

      • xattt 3 hours ago

        > Would be cute if there's some animal that moves along instead of the house.

        I can suggest a snail with a shell that has a window and a chimney out the back!

        It can also be a something man-made but playful like a freight train with a caboose. You’d only see the back end of the train and it would move off screen over the course of the day.

        Mind you, trains are now ruined for me with John Oliver’s production of Thomas the tank engine.

    • bazzargh 8 hours ago

      I noodled with a project a couple of years ago to pick art based on the weather https://bazzargh.github.io/weather/

      put it on 'manual filter' and try setting some of the filters, you can see the tagged images it comes up with. I wasn't really interested in this being an accurate weather report, I was thinking more of using it in a photoframe or as a desktop background for mood.

      the image tags are all in here https://github.com/bazzargh/bazzargh.github.io/blob/master/w...

      and were largely done manually, I started by picking paintings I liked, then looking for gaps in the tags and trying to find paintings to cover those.

      • duck 6 hours ago

        Your page is getting flagged for phishing on Chrome.

        • lbotos 6 hours ago

          In FF as well, Just reported it as "not suspicious"

          • bazzargh 4 hours ago

            Huh. That's new. I'm guessing it must have been someone who read it here, I don't think I ever even posted it anywhere else. I'm not sure what they could think it's phishing for; there's no links out, no redirection, and nowhere for you to enter any personal information; the only thing it does is pull images from wikimedia, plus the source code is right there for all to see?

            If it was anyone here who reported it... mind telling us why?

        • LeoPanthera 10 hours ago

          Ha, this is great. I hooked up an old photo frame to OpenAI's DALL-E image generator, which is told to make an image based on the current weather data right now. It updates every few hours.

          This is what it's showing right now: https://ibb.co/8K5jZ3B

        • qnleigh 8 hours ago

          This is super-fun. Kinda makes me want to do the following: set up a camera to take regular photos of a greenspace near my house. Record couldcover data and date stamps alongside the images, and then then show the most similar image to the current forecast as a background, maybe on my laptop. Wouldn't convey as much information as this project, but it could be very satisfying.

          • Ajedi32 4 hours ago

            I've been using a similar concept for my Android wallpaper for a while now[1].

            I love the idea of artwork that actually conveys useful information.

            [1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kaka.wallpaper...

            • freddie_mercury an hour ago

              I've had this live wallpaper for years and always liked it.

            • vages 3 hours ago

              Reminds me of the main view in the Yr.no app, which visualises the weather as a picture of how things would look outside a window at different times of the day. It is actually quite easy to get a feel for the amount (and type) of precipitation, as well as the wind, from the animations.

              However, you only get to see one moment at a time, requiring you to scroll horizontally through the day, and the temperature is only shown as a number.

              https://apps.apple.com/no/app/yr/id490989206?l=nb

              https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nrk.yr&pcam...

              • nelblu 9 hours ago

                Great work! That said if we are focusing on the UX, windy.com has got the best weather reporting experience.

                Ex: I am almost never interested in "30% chance of shower at 08:00pm" type of forecast. I am more interested in the trend in which the clouds/rains are moving. This helps me figure out which direction I can drive to get the best sunshine or whatever else.

                Is there anyone else who is doing it the way windy.com is doing? I really love them, and so far their experience is great (almost no dark UX patterns), that said I would love to see some more competition in this space.

                • jasonmarks_ 9 hours ago

                  > This helps me figure out which direction I can drive to get the best sunshine or whatever else.

                  I published a road trip weather app that crunches forecasts for you if you're going for a drive and would like to avoid the worst of the weather. It's great for evaluating whether to start a trip during the evening or the next morning. Timestamps are built using Google directions so you have about as accurate a forecast as you can in 2024.

                  > I am almost never interested in "30% chance of shower at 08:00pm" type of forecast.

                  I understand this sentiment but that is sorta where medium term forecasting is right now.

                  Android or iOS https://weatherthetrip.com/download

                  • captainkrtek 9 hours ago

                    I’m a big fan of Meteoblue, they provide a lot of different forecast ensemble visualizations. While not the same as windy in terms of ux, it does a good job of conveying model uncertainty and model agreement.

                    • unanimous 9 hours ago

                      Zoom Earth is similar to Windy.com

                      https://zoom.earth/

                      • adamfeldman 9 hours ago
                        • kbutler 7 hours ago

                          We used windy.com earlier this year to choose our location for the total eclipse in Texas. Worked out perfectly - great view for the eclipse, then the clouds rolled in...

                        • leobg 5 hours ago

                          These are gorgeous. What a great idea.

                          • 3abiton 9 hours ago

                            This is one of the best microcontroller projects I've encoutered recently! Amazing work!

                            • jp57 9 hours ago

                              It's an interesting idea, but some of the image semantics seem weirdly wrong. In particular, the sky shouldn't be light at night, and the sun shouldn't be high at sunrise.

                              If you have to learn counterintuitive things like "the appearance of the sun anywhere in the sky indicates sunrise", and "nighttime is indicated by, well, idk what exactly, but it's not darkness", it kind of fails at it's main purpose, I think.

                              EDIT: I'll add that many weather apps have a left-to-right timeline of some sort, and indicate sunrise and sunset with intuitive iconography.

                              EDIT2: The Windy.com timeline view shows sky condition, day/night, moon phase, temperature, precipitation, and wind speed and direction in a nice compact left-to-right timeline. (click the summary in the upper left)

                              • xd1936 9 hours ago

                                Love love love love this. This would be great for kids. I pitched a very similar "weather for kids" visualizer product idea on the very first episode of my podcast.

                                https://spitball.show/@podcast/episodes/1

                                • hinkley 3 hours ago

                                  Reminds me a little bit of Tad Williams’ Otherland series.

                                  • tamimio 9 hours ago

                                    Looks great, would love if it was fully offline and interface with sensors directly

                                    • celie56 9 hours ago

                                      Maybe I misread the docs, but it looked like it was generating a visual for the whole day. If this were offline you could have it double as a clock and regenerate the image every N minutes.

                                    • yaj54 9 hours ago

                                      It's like a line-scan camera for the weather.

                                      • darrylcodes 5 hours ago

                                        This is really cool! I would use this daily if it were an app

                                        • rickcarlino 10 hours ago

                                          Love the monochrome artwork, great work on this project.

                                          • jerjerjer 9 hours ago

                                            From readme:

                                            > Traditional weather stations often display sensor readings as raw numerical data. Navigating these dashboards can be overwhelming and stressful, as it requires significant effort to locate, interpret, and visualize specific parameters effectively.

                                            Simply fascinating. The reverse holds true for me. Numbers provide easily identifiable and recognizable references, while sample images look incomprehensible to me. Without accompanying descriptions, I'd never guess what the author is getting at (except in the broadest of strokes). To each their own, of course.

                                            • SebastianKra 8 hours ago

                                              If you'd like to see this implemented in a practical way, check out Weather Strip.

                                              It's a master class in information density while also being intuitive and readable.

                                              https://www.weatherstrip.app/

                                            • lb1lf 8 hours ago

                                              In a somewhat related vein, the wonderful Ootside[0] website gives you the weather with a Scottish twist.

                                              Mostly, the weather around where I live is described as 'Mostly shite'.

                                              [0] https://ootsi.de/

                                              • grahamj 2 hours ago

                                                Mine is "Glaekit", whatever that means.

                                              • bobabob 8 hours ago

                                                It looks lovely but it's absolutely incomprehensible beyond "maybe it'll rain" and "maybe i'll be sunny". Without the explanation of what the symbols meant I'd never guess.

                                                • pilooch 8 hours ago

                                                  Can't wait for the stable diffusion version :)