If you've ever been annoyed at the stock iPhone weather app for promising you sunny skies as you stand in a torrential downpour, the Dark Sky app is definitely a must-have for you.
As far as iPhone weather apps go that predict precipitation, it really doesn't get any better than Dark Sky. The iPhone and iPad app, developed by Adam Grossman and Jack Turner, delivers hyperlocal, short-term weather forecasts that are remarkably accurate.
If it's going to rain within the next 15 minutes, Dark Skies will send a push notification to warn you in advance. The Home screen for Dark Sky is a time graph that represents the chances of precipitation for the next hour. Beneath the graph, you can check on the chances of precipitation for the next hour, the following three hours, the evening and overnight forecast, as well as what to expect come morning.
From Kickstarter to Must-Have iPhone App
Dark Sky began as a Kickstarter project that raised $40,000 from 1,200 backers. According to Mashable, it first launched last April, and by the time version 2.0 came around in August, it had already sold over 35,000 copies.
The 1,200 backers were all promised free copies of the app, but facilitating this proved to be less than simple, due to Apple's app store policies, the company explains on its blog:
"The solution we settled on was Apple's gifting mechanism: essentially, buying each of our backers their copy of the app. This isn't quite as arduous as it sounds: Everything is done right from within iTunes, and you are allowed to provide Apple a comma-separated list of email addresses to gift to, though there is a limit on the number of characters that can be submitted at once; we were able to send about fifty copies of the app in each batch. A couple hours later, each of our Kickstarter backers had an email with their copy of Dark Sky."
Dark Sky sells for $3.99.
