Every so often we stumble across a cool piece of code which delivers on its promise way better than we could hope for, especially when it comes to cross platform functionality. In this case it’s a weather app, which is remarkable since there are a lot of good ones around competing for our attention.
Rain Alarm has a very simple function, to warn you about rain or snow with an alarm and animation. There are lots of great things the developers have done to make this so cool, so we’ll list them in bullets below.
1. The app uses standard government weather services from over 20 countries.
2. It uses Google Maps as standard, but if you don’t use that, there’s also a version called Rain Alarm OSM which uses the open source OpenStreetMap. Nice.
3. It delivers an animated radar picture of the rain in your selected area over a 2 hour period, which is enough to let you know if water is heading your way.
4. As well as iPhone and Android versions, there are add-ons for Firefox, Chrome and Windows. Excellent.
There’s also a choice of widgets in Android which you can use to get an instant snapshot of the chance of rain near where you are.
The software also has an option to use a Sony SmartWatch, so you can have the weather permanently attached to your wrist. Of course when we say weather we don’t mean wind, temperature and other stuff. But then again, for most people it’s all about the rain isn’t it? Superb app, and well executed. Recommended.