Figma

Maker

📌

Hey everyone! Today we’re excited to announce Weather Machine, a powerful developer tool that greatly simplifies integrating weather data into your application. If you’ve ever tried to use a weather API, you probably already know the challenges. Weather APIs are notoriously complicated—every vendor offers their own proprietary data structures and request formats, and they vary in performance, price, accuracy, and reliability. Sometimes services disappear or get shut down entirely. It’s complex, time-consuming, and expensive to work with these systems, which distracts from the main thing you’re trying to do: building a great app! With Weather Machine, you can write just one integration for your app and get highly accurate global forecasts from The Weather Company, AccuWeather, AerisWeather, and many other reputable sources. It’s drop-in compatible with Dark Sky's API formats, so you can switch over in minutes. And it includes an advanced forecast-aware caching system, which can cut your data usage up to 50%, saving you money without sacrificing any speed or accuracy. Since the Dark Sky API is shutting down soon, we’re running an introductory promo period for Weather Machine: you can sign up and use it entirely for free through March 31, 2023. (You’ll also need to have a paid account with the provider(s) you choose to use in lieu of Dark Sky.) Check it out and let us know what you think!

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2yr ago

ZHENG Haibo

ViewCoder

@jonasdowney Congratulations on the launch, Weather Machine looks very compelling . Good Luck!

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2yr ago

Nikita Abrosimov

Hey @jonasdowney ! The product looks very promising, considering how much friction we usually have with API providers. Do you have any extra processing on your side? For instance, handing the timeframes on the weather radar layers?

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2yr ago

Nicky Leach

IFTTT

Congrats @trevorturk and @jonasdowney! For folks who haven’t worked on a weather app or with weather APIs before it may not be obvious why supporting multiple sources is so important. Can’t you just find the “best” one and stick with it? Different providers can be more or less in accurate in different areas, but perhaps more importantly, users will often just prefer one source to another. If your app says 54 but Accuweather.com says 52, your app is wrong 🤷. Mercury Weather just ran an ad on the Accidental Podcast that describes this phenomenon well! Even if you don’t need to be able to offer multiple sources concurrently, being able to plug in new APIs without rewriting your app is huge! It gives you the flexibility to find the best single fit for your users, find the sources with best pricing for your specific usage, etc.

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2yr ago

Weather Machine

Magical modern weather APIs for humans.