This is a new thing I’m trying. I’ve been an Android user for about 8 months, and having churned though my fair share of apps, both good and bad, I’ve decided to share some of the gems I’ve come across.
AIX Weather
I’m going to start small, with a widget. As an ex-iphone user, having widgets on the homescreen (without having to jailbreak and use kludgy html based widgets) is great – and the grandaddy of all widgets is the weather widget. There are a lot of great weather widgets, but not that many that show hourly forecasts as their primary function. AIX Weather does this in a compact, informative and attractive way – bottom widget in the screenshot, just in case you were wondering.
AIX Weather displays a grid/graph showing weather conditions, temperature and rainfall for the next 24 hours in your chosen location. As you can see from the attached screenshot, the style is very simple, but attractive, and most of all, informative.
Weather data is sourced from either NOAA, or the Norway Meteorological Institute. The Global coverage seems to be pretty comprehensive, and the data seems to be pretty accurate. Unfortunately, you need to manually set the location – it would be great if the developer would add automatic location detection – but that’s only a minor drawback for me. You can also set how often the data is updated, and also whether it updates when the screen off, which is good for improving battery life. Choose between metric or imperial units.
The settings also allow you fine grained control over the look of the widget. You can adjust the colour and translucency of every element of the widget so that it fits with the style and colours of your homescreen. The size of the widget is also adjustable. A cool feature here is the ability to download profiles for your device, so that it fits just right. If you like detailed weather forecasts right there on your homescreen, AIX Weather is for you.