Local app developers “buUuk”:http://www.buuuk.com/ updated their “WeatherLah”:http://www.weatherlah.com/ app to include CrowdCast – their way of crowd sourcing the latest weather forecast. Basically we just go to the CrowdCast tab, and choose whether it is raining or not. Simple. Get enough input and you have a fair idea of the actual weather condition at that part of the island.
This is definitely much more accurate than any weather gauge. Only thing is people must actively run the app to do that. So if you want to know the weather, and want to contribute – just do a CrowdCast every time it rains with your WeatherLah app! For all you know, the next time you step out of your house, you won’t be come wet … lah!
Besides CrowdCast, WeatherLah allows you to set rain warning alerts at towns which you can select, and if you don’t mind some background location work, you can even configure it to notify you if the area you had just moved is going to rain. Nifty especially whenever monsoon strikes. There is also an alert for PSI which will be useful whenever our southern neighbour decides to burn their forest. Lastly there is also a twitter tab that shows tweets from “@NEAsg”:http://www.twitter.com/neasg and “@weatherlah”:http://www.twitter.com/weatherlah for some twitter weather alerts.
I have seen many weather apps in the App Store and many are decked out with such detailed meteorological information like wind direction, humility blah blah blah. All I need to know is whether the place I am going is raining, or not. And that’s where WeatherLah hits the spot. It is well designed and tells you the weather as it is. Add in CrowdCast – we have a winner!
update 2 version 1.2.1 which was released today seems to fix the bugs below.
update The current version (v 1.2) seems to have some problems:
- at the Alert Settings tab, I wasn’t able to save the setting to switch on Heavy Rain alert and Quiet Time
- a bigger probem seems to be that the Background Location checking of weather status can’t be switch off once you switch it on, even if you “force quit” the app. The only way you can switch the Background Location feature off is when you delete the app. So if you do have the app, I suggest NOT to toggle the option to run Background Location check till they fix this
- One other possible bug is if you are listening to music with the iPod app, when you switch to WeatherLah, it stops the music. No reason why it should.
Have informed the BuUuk guys about these and I will update when I hear more from the developers.
Read more about how they came about this simple but clever idea of CrowdCasting our weather at “Navjot Pawera’s blog”:http://www.navjotpawera.com/blog/2011/01/25/a-bit-about-weather-lah
- download WeatherLah for “free from iTunes”:http://itunes.apple.com/sg/app/weatherlah/id411646329?mt=8
Here are some screen shots to see what a nicely created app this is.
