A clever forecaster which will warn you if it’s all about to get extreme
This neat little app is designed to notify you about changes in the weather. It initially sets itself according to your current location, although you can add any number of other cities worldwide – which is ideal if you regularly travel between different countries, or are just curious about global weather conditions.Locations are color-coded, from bright yellow for the hottest cities, through temperate greens to icy blues. Each panel displays the city name, its current temperature in (Celsius or Fahrenheit as dictated in the settings) and the current alert, such as highs and lows, extreme conditions, sunrise/sunset and so on.
To delete a city, slide its panel to the left until it just fades away.
Tap a panel, and you get a slightly more detailed view, with today’s alerts, current temperature, weather conditions and wind speed. Below this is a 24-hour timeline showing a graph of the temperature; here you can drag the time marker to see how the weather changes over the course of the day. As you do so, the alert panel displays the different notifications, correlating to the various conditions, including things like temperature highs and lows, chances of rain, high wind speeds, ice, snow and so on.
Warning signs
Back on the main screen, you activate alerts for each city by simply sliding its panel to the right, where a little alarm bell icon turns green – just slide again to deactivate. With the system turned on, you’ll get notifications of weather changes an hour before they’re forecast to arrive.
To activate alerts for each city, you just slide right until the alarm bell turns green.
As the developers state, Alertic is an app for people who don’t care about meteorology, but about the weather. There are lots of good weather apps out there, but they largely require you to boot them up and actively check the forecast. With alerts coming via the Notification Center, at least you’ll have fair warning when a bout of inclement weather is due.
Alertic is a straightforward app with a clear and simple purpose. It’s easy to use and provides enough information for most people. We did encounter a few issues when adding cities, where they either wouldn’t appear or it would crash the app. Hopefully this will be patched in due course.
A gentle breeze plus strong sun – a potentially dangerous combination.
The notification system works fine, but if anything we’d like it to send more regular updates – even if it’s to say the weather is staying the same. Otherwise you just end up opening it to check the forecast as you would with any other app.
Still, at least with Alertic if there’s any drastic climate change, you’ll be made aware of it beforehand. So if you’ve been sitting in a cosily heated room with the blinds drawn, the sudden onslaught of the next ice age shouldn’t be too much of a shock when you open the front door.
Price: $0.99/£0.69
Version: 1.0.3
Size: 0.8 MB
Platform: iOS Universal
Developer: Adam Hayek
