A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece (2023)

Summary

On January 1, 2023, Apple sunsetted (pun intended) the Dark Sky mobile app on iOS. Apple purchased the company behind the popular weather application in early 2020, then announced that it would be shutting down the Dark Sky applications (first on Android, then on iOS and web), and finally stated in 2022 that the forecast technology would be integrated into the Apple Weather app with iOS 16. Comparison of Dark Sky with Apple Weather. But Dark Sky was much more than just an API or a set of “forecast technologies.” The design of the Dark Sky mobile application represented a hallmark of information design because the team clearly obsessed over how people would actually use the app on a daily basis. Here’s a gallery of screenshots I personally took in the last year. The design of Dark Sky was so wonderful that I could understand the shape of the weather at a glance, even from a zoomed out view of the app. Common use cases for a weather app Before we can dissect what makes the design of this app so special, let’s define the most common use cases for a weather app. A good weather app attempts to address a range of use cases in a person’s life. Here are some common use cases for a weather app, starting with the contextual goals first: You’ll notice that the questions I want to answer vary based on the context and situation I’m in. This is the perfect situation for software that embraces good information design principles. In Magic Ink, Bret Victor defined information design “as the design of context-sensitive information graphics.” Unlike static graphics, like a weather map in a newspaper, information graphics in software can be highly dynamic and can incorporate context from the user’s environment. Dark Sky aggressively leaned into these ideas, and the team worked hard to turn nearly everything in the application into a context-sensitive information graphic. Let’s dive deeper into some examples where this notion is in full display. Weather forecast for the day at a precise...