iPhone app – weather charts
Many of the raw charts on which weather forecasters base their predictions are freely available on the internet, notably on German site www.wetterzentrale.de The site is badly formatted for iPhones, however, so I’ve written a free web app that provides easy access to some of the most prominent meteorological models for the UK. Five sections have the GFS ensembles, ECM charts, UKMO charts, the edited UKMO (so-called “fax”) charts and the GFS charts. The images follow on one from the other and automatically resize when you turn the screen to landscape.
Visit the link below in your iPhone – the app will run in your mobile Safari browser but, for the best experience, go to “add to homescreen” – this will add a nice little icon and run fullscreen.
As the app has to download lots of images it takes 10 seconds or so to load on a good wifi connection; more on 3G.
The app uses the excellent jQTouch, a jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone.
Let me know what you think (and if you have any good ideas for a name or further development) in the comments below.
Julius Honnor is a writer, photographer and web person who lives in London and travels a lot. He has written several guidebooks for Footprint, Fodor's, Rough Guides and others, as well as for newspapers and magazines.
This is a fantastic little bit of programming. I stumbled upon it by accident and wish I’d found it a whole lot sooner!
Many thanks.
Can you devise one for Android too???
Mark
Hi Paul, glad to hear someone’s using it!
I’m afraid I haven’t checked it for a while and I noticed yesterday that UKMO Fax charts weren’t working – this is now fixed.
Mark, The latest version jQTouch claims to support Android, so I’ve updated it. I don’t have a way of testing it so you’ll have to let me know if it works.