Review: Fresh Air offers beautiful weather forecasting

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Yesterday it was cold. Today it is cold. Tomorrow it will be cold. Apparently, it’s going to be cold for the foreseeable future and there’s no place near me to drive to where it’s even the slightest bit warm. Thank you, Mr. Gore.

If the cold is getting you down, let me point you to a beautiful new weather app called Fresh Air. For just $0.99, it provides beautiful screen design, great interactive weather forecasts, clever date book integration and more. It’s not going to improve the outlook but it gets you that information in a visually appealing way.

With it, you can scroll hour-by-hour through the upcoming forecast, with overnight and daytime trends presented with colors, graphs, and icons. There’s a lot of information packed into its sparse design. I particularly like how you can view calendar events with temperatures. That Moms get together at the park on Thursday? Maybe that should move to Starbucks instead.

The app includes several built-in discoverable features and it introduces these with minimalist training hints. The occasional “tap here” or “swipe there” reminders expose these features, without requiring an excess of labels that would kill the presentation. While the app is immediately usable, this kind of training philosophy ensures the best user experience over the long term.

If I had one major complaint about the app, it’s that I can’t remember the name. “What’s that new weather app? That thing? The one I just installed? Was it something something weather something?” In fact, no, it’s Fresh Air, and trying to remember that without having to hop into iTunes to figure out “what is the most recent app on my purchases list” is going to take me some time.  It’s the sort of app you have to remember by putting it in a particular place on your screen but it’s also the kind of quick-reference that you’d want to promote anyway.

Fresh Air is narrow in its scope. It does one job, it does it well, and it’s extremely well priced.

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