Weather Traveler Pro Review – Weather apps can be beautiful

Our rating:

By: Simpact

Version #: 1.0.1

Date Released: 2014-07-13

Developer: Weather Traveller

Price: 1.99

User Rating:

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Can a weather app be beautiful? Or fun? I think 80% of the time we don’t care. As long as it is accurate, we are happy. But nowadays, forecasting is in general so good that a better design can easily win against poorer apps, the remaining 20% can make or break an app. Weather Traveler Pro (there’s also a free, Lite version you can check too) is very beautiful. And in a sense, fun too.

With Weather Traveler, you can literally travel as you check weather in faraway places. There are more than 10.000 pictures (carefully chosen, according to the developer and so far we agree after checking 20 or so random locations) including places at more than 50 countries, making sure the best touristic destinations  (with the best available, properly licensed pictures) are covered.

This means of course that I don’t get pictures of my small town, but of close touristic hub Barcelona (and very beautiful sceneries at that, even for a local like me.) But checking other, more touristic places results in more to-the-point pictures. Helsinki, Reykjavik all return awesome pictures of the cityscape and countryside alike. Appearance can also be tweaked depending on how much detail you want in your view, as well as adjusting transparency. All in all, the design is 100% iOS 7. Design-wise, Weather Traveler Pro is a 10/10. There are two designs, you can choose, though. A more classy one, solid and smooth and a translucent one, more suited to iOS 7 tastes. Since not everyone loved the translucencies in iOS 7, this is a smart move: users have the power to choose.

The app is designed to be really fluid in how it presents its pictures. Tapping on the current temperature switches layouts, moving from only temperature, to temperature+high-low to the full view. Handy, so you can leave it open on your iPhone as a stand-up dynamic photo frame, where you get to choose the speed in settings (I found the default of every 10 seconds a little too fast for stand-up, but found 40 seconds perfect at that). Once you are in one of the reduced modes, you can step forward or backward through the pictures, and even download them to your Photo Albums.

If you grow tired of watching pictures of your area, you can tap the globe on upper-right to select Around the world, where you get to see images from your selected country (you can choose a specific country, a continent or a whole region,) in any weather condition and time of the day (did I say pictures are chosen depending on current weather and time of day? They are!) You can see how it all looks and ties together in the video below:

Of course, being a weather app, prediction is also important. How good is it? I’ve been using it for the past 10 days, and so far it has being completely spot-on, both in Spain and France. Of course, it uses Weather Underground data, a great weather data provider and the merit of the prediction is theirs, the developer just chose one of the best options. The most complete weather view includes temperature, humidity, precipitation and UV index, both hourly and daily, as well as trends. Feature complete, very good looks and has a free version you can test before purchasing. What else do you need to go get it from the App Store?

In case you are still unsure, we recommend you check their Lite version or join our giveaway for a chance to win a promocode of it. It’s truly worth it!