“What’s this? Another Weather app on Beautiful Pixels, what’s going on?” There’s a good chance a few of you may have exclaimed that after reading the title of the post or our tweet. We agree that we often feature a LOT of weather apps here on the site, but that’s only because there are a TON of good looking weather apps being developed for iOS and Android. Thanks to our love of beautiful pixels, we simply cannot resist featuring the work of some talented designers and developers and giving them the exposure they deserve.
A few weeks ago, I came across a teaser for an app with an interesting approach towards weather info. Unlike your traditional apps, Weathercube—as the name suggests—is essentially an elongated cube that has your weather info placed on each of its sides. There are no buttons in the app and everything is controlled using multi-touch gestures. You can swipe, pinch, stretch and tap to move around in the app. The app looks absolutely gorgeous and all these gestures make it fun to play with.
The main screen gives you a summary of today’s weather after it automatically detects your location, showing you the daily forecast that includes overcast info, degrees, windspeed, rainfall, humidity and cloud coverage. You can tap each cell to show the details across morning/afternoon/evening. Swiping from the bottom to top takes you to the hourly forecast for that day and swiping from the top to bottom takes you to the 6-day forecast for that current city. You can change between cities by simply swiping on the name of the city at the top.
Weathercube lets you share your weather info on Twitter on Facebook by simply “stretching” or reverse pinching on the screen horizontally. Unfortunately, it doesn’t use the native Twitter integration in iOS and makes you enter your Twitter password again. To enter the Settings screen on Weathercube, you again reverse pinch or “stretch” the screen, but vertically this time. Alternatively, you can just tap in the dead center of the screen to open the Settings screen. Here, you can add/edit cities, choose between 7 available theme colors or set it to ‘Randomizer’ (which very much reminds me of Realmac Software’s Clear app).
Weathercube is designed to make heavy use of gestures while being simple, clean and of course, beautiful. It uses nice icons and big bold text to display the relevant info on the screen. The app also has mini sounds, which is sure to make Mikhail happy. It’s available on the App Store for just $1.99.