The Yahoo Weather app has been widely, and deservedly, praised as an example of a beautifully conceived and executed native app. I agree with those assessments, and use it on my iPhone most days to try to understand how many facets of Canada’s weather I might expect to experience in the coming hours and days.
There’s one detail, though, that stands out as gratingly wrong for me. It’s such a small detail that to point it our seems petty, but in an app that otherwise is of such high quality this tiny detail stands out.
While I can configure the app to use metric measurements for temperatures and wind speeds, it uses a mix of imperial and metric in the text summary of the forecast. The imperial measurements are shown first, with a precisely calculated metric equivalent shown in parentheses. In the example shown here, that makes for an awkwardly presented result of “High around 35ºF (1.7ºC)”. Wind speed presentation is similarly awkward.
The word “around” shouldn’t be followed by such a precise measurement. Beyond that, the text summary should just show me the metric measurements if that’s what I’ve configured.
On an unrelated note, I’m looking forward to seeing some warmer temperatures showing up in the app…