Launched this week
Southerly
See your weather at a radial glance, no boring lists of data
10 followers
See your weather at a radial glance, no boring lists of data
10 followers
Southerly draws the coming weather as a single radial dial - an infographic of temperature, rain, wind, day and night, sunset/sunrise, weather alerts - all visualised at once. A unique iPhone weather app with optional offline tides, navigation details, an on-device Apple Intelligence generated "Weather Story", and if you are Aotearoa/New Zealand there is te reo Māori and the maramataka with specific information for predator trapping, hunting, fishing (including Solunar theory).
The problem. Most weather apps tell you a number. But the questions we actually ask are about shape: when does the rain arrive? Do I need my umbrella? Does the afternoon warm up? Is the wind easing before sunset for a beer on the deck? In other apps a list of hourly icons makes you read the forecast line by line - it never lets you simply see the day.
The inspiration. Back in 2012, an app by the German design studio Raureif solved this beautifully. It drew the whole forecast around an analog clock face - temperature as a colour ring, rain as a blue bloom from the centre, wind as fine radial lines - and you turned the clock hand to "jump into the future." It won design awards, it was genuinely loved... and it's been gone from the App Store for years. Nothing ever replaced it. I missed it enough to use it as a basis for what I wanted a weather app to be like.
How using it ourselves changed it. Southerly (named for the cold front that sweeps up New Zealand, but also a bit of a play on our location) was an app we used every day, sailing, hiking, mountain-biking around NZ, and real use kept bending and extending the design:
- Offline-first, always. Your last forecast is cached, so the dial still works with no signal - in the bush, or offshore. No blank screen at the exact moment you most want the forecast.
- Tides, with no tide API. A built-in harmonic engine predicts tides for ~18,000 stations worldwide, entirely on-device (~2 MB), drawn as a thin curve right on the dial with high/low water marked.
- The sky and the moon. A day/night band from real sunrise/sunset times, and a moon-phase glyph at lunar noon - the solunar window fishers and hunters plan around.
- Te reo Māori and the Maramataka optionally for New Zealand locations. Place names in te reo, and the Māori lunar calendar with per-night guidance - a feature that grew directly out of a request from predator-trapping practitioners (for those not aware, there is a NZ-wide effort to remove introduced pests such as rodents and mustelids)
- Wind you can feel. Gust dots hover above each wind spoke, so the gap reads as gustiness - and as you scrub the hand, haptics tick with the rain, wind, tide or temperature under your finger.
- Keep turning. Southerly's hand keeps unrolling into following days - the fade trails just behind your finger.
Weather data currently comes from Apple Weather, with worldwide severe-weather warnings.
It's been a great journey and some great technical problems were worked on for the offline tide model and Maori lunar calendar. It's what we use over everything else for general weather and I think you'll like it.
That single radial dial is a really clever way to read the whole forecast at a glance without scrolling through panels. Curious to see the maramataka features since I've never seen a weather app lean into that side of things.
@selimge8y Thanks Selim, researchers generally recognise at least a dozen well-documented maramataka traditions, with many more local variations. Different iwi begin the lunar month at different points in the moon’s cycle, use slightly different sequences of named nights, and may interpret those nights differently in response to local environmental patterns, such as seasonal bird migrations. I’ve chosen to follow Te Whānau-ā-Apanui as it is widely cited and well documented. It was an interesting project to implement it into the app and I hope it becomes useful to the neighbourhood trapping groups.
One thing that would make this even more useful for me is the ability to compare the radial dial across multiple days side by side, like a small timeline at the bottom showing the next 5-7 days. Right now I can only see one snapshot at a time and have to swipe through to compare. A horizontal scroll of mini-dials underneath the main one would make spotting weather trends much faster, especially for planning a fishing or hunting trip in Aotearoa.
@ksevim90613 This is an interesting idea, thank you for the feedback. I like it. I'll give it some thought how it can be implemented without cluttering the interface.
That single radial dial is genuinely clever, way easier to read at a glance than the usual stacked forecast. Also cool seeing the maramataka and predator trapping notes for NZ, feels like it was actually built for people here.
@layda138459 Indeed it was; we were using it as a non-published app for quite a while. As we showed others the enthusiasm grew.
The radial dial is genuinely clever, packing a surprising amount of info into one glance without feeling cluttered. Really appreciate the maramataka detail for NZ users too, that level of local care is rare.
@bavcichali87886 Thank you. I think it is pretty unique. But it's also a fine line to add data/info without it becoming overwhelming.