Ambient Weather

Not very good if this is not the initial release. Very slow. After it opens if you want to scroll down, you have to wait quite a bit for it all to load, or to do something (twiddle it’s digital thumbs?). I changed the name of the sensors from “Sensor 1” to “Balcony”. I hit the back space key and nothing happen. I hit it several times and then after about 10-15 seconds, it back spaced. the same results for typing in the new name. I learned by the time I renamed all my sensors. I really like the weather station, but the app needs a bunch of work.

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This app is basically a custom web browser that does nothing but show the AmbientWeather web site. The app shows exactly the same view as the website, and I do mean exactly, right down to the rendering bugs. There’s no additional functionality provided. You don’t get an iOS look-and-feel. You don’t get an Apple Watch complication. You don’t get Siri Shortcuts. You don’t get anything that the web page doesn’t give you. That extends to usability. For example, on a computer, you can use the mouse to select part of the weather graph to see numerical data for that date and time. It doesn’t really work for touch screens; it’s mouse-centric. You can tap, but you can’t drag to find the data point you want; doing so starts a text selection. The iOS app behaves the same way. It’s clear that this app is a wrapper around a web view. Other problems with the website also extend to the app: slow loading of graph data, graph data not loading, seeing the login screen every time it loads even when you’ve set the site to remember-me mode... I appreciate that AmbientWeather wants to provide an app. But this is literally the least effort possible in an app. I suspect that it was developed using a cross-platform “easy app development via HTML” toolkit. The only reason to use it is to avoid opening a new Safari tab.

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You’re better off just creating a shortcut to the webpage on your home screen. It takes a solid 20 seconds before everything loads and you can scroll down without the app glitching and hanging. If you want to change the date/filter range of the graphs, or interact with them using the slider bar, the interface becomes unresponsive. If you want to refresh, be prepared to wait another 30 seconds. Hopefully future releases address the speed...until then I’ll be using the webpage.

If you do not see data from your weather station, check that your ObserverIP firmware version is at least 4.0. No data was shown for mine for over an hour until I tracked down that my ObserverIP receiver firmware version was at v3.0.3. After updating to the latest, data was available immediately. It is nice to have this app option for viewing data in addition to Weather Underground.

Previous versions forced a log in every time the app was launched and sometimes, the login would fail. So far, this new version logs in consistently and updates weather info automatically. I was about to give up on this app but, now, I find it very useful. Keep it up Ambient Weather!