Weather Machine is a very detailed and information loaded weather application. Honestly, this app might have too many features…if that is possible! I’m going to explain a few features of the app and then I will let you watch the demo video so that you can get the full feel of the app.

When the app opens, it will ask to find your current location. After it did this the first time, I actually shut this feature off in the Settings so that it didn’t ask every time I open the app…it is slow and it is not extrememly accurate.

Once the app is open, you will see the current weather conditions including the current temperature, feels like temperature, weather conditions, pressure, humidity, wind direction and wind speed. It you double-tap on the Current Weather screen, it will enlarge the screen and you will get the current visibility and dew point. If you tap on the arrows at the bottom of the current weather screen, it will scroll through surrounding cities. If you rotate the device into landscape mode, you will get a animated Satellite map of the current conditions, a current conditions map, a forecast map and an animated doppler radar map.

Back on the main screen, you can drag your finger down the screen (or tap on the dates on the right side of the screen) and it will bring up today’s and the next four days’ weather forecast. If you rotate your device while on one of the forecast screens, you will get an hour-by-hour forecast of that day. You can quickly view the five day forecast at the bottom of the screen as well.

If you double-tap on the days along the right hand side of the screen, you will get a detailed morning, afternoon, evening and night forecast for that day.

Along the left hand side of the screen is where you can select, search and enter new locations into the app. This allows you to quickly switch between multiple cities’ weather. You need to tap and drag the icon to the right to bring the menus out.

The “i” icon on the upper left side of the screen is the Settings. Here you can choose a number of settings and customize the background image for the app.

That is just a quick overview of the Weather Machine. It does take some time using the app before you get used to finding all the features. Overall a fun, nicely designed and feature-filled weather app!

Demo Video:

ScreenShots

App Store Description:

Weather Machine is not the usual weather application. It is not only easy to use, reliable and complete (having more than 58,000 weather stations around the world), but it stands out with a beautiful and original graphical interface. To show weather information, Weather Machine uses beautiful and clear panels that float in the blue sky, allowing you to travel through time, projecting you into the future with simple and natural gestures of your hand. You can see all the weather details you need, including:
* Maximum and minimum temperatures
* Perceived temperature
* Speed of the wind and its direction
* Atmospheric pressure
* Dew point
* UV Index
* Humidity
* Probability of rain

And there’s more: you can view the current situation of each locality, have forecasts of the next 5 days, and you can also go even more in detail consulting forecasts divided into day quarters for the next 48 hours.

Moreover, by rotating your iPhone, you can browse hour-by-hour weather forecasts and maps of your preferred regions. In addition, you can use the GPS receiver to accurately determine the closest location to you so to have related weather information.

You also have the possibility to customize the appearance of Weather Machine by choosing an image in your photo library to use it as background image.

But this is only the beginning: you will have the assurance of continuous and frequent updates where will be corrected any problems you will find and, above all, will be issued new and useful features. Here a preview of the next releases:
* Weather alarms for US only
* Severe weather warnings for the whole world
* Support for other languages

To get the latest information on Weather Machine and on the progress of its development, have a look to its official blog:

http://weathermachineblog.wordpress.com/

Go on sending your feedbacks to the support email address. We care your suggestions!
What’s new

* Added the possibility to see the hour-by-hour forecasts for the first 48 hours and for 5 days (to show them you only need to display the wished forecast panel and rotate your iPhone as for the maps)
* Added the possibility to set a specific background for each city in your list of preferred localities
* Added the possibility to see animations of certain maps (OS 3.0 only)
* Added the full support of the French language and the partial support of the German language
* Improved the usability of all the buttons (even if I suggest to use gestures in substitution to the buttons)
* Improved the fluidity of some animations
* Some other fixes

The kewl think about this map is that you can pinch and zoom just like Google Maps. You can zoom way out to see the whole country or way in down to county and city levels. You can also tap “Options” in the top right corner of the site to turn on animation and severe weather overlays and change to different Satellite views.

Another thing you might want to do is make a different web clip with a different city and name them by each city. To do this you have to start over at the i.wund.com and enter the new city. You can’t just zoom to the location and add to homescreen.

ScreenShots

I’ve used this web app forever and have never written about it so I thought I’d share it with you if you haven’t heard of it. I think it’s the best weather app I’ve seen so far. I’m biased because I use Weather Underground’s full site on my computer. Weather Underground for the iPhone is easy to get to, just go to i.wund.com.

Once there you can type in a city or zip in the search box and find your city.

Once you find it, you can tap on the plus sign in Safari and add it to your home screen. I named mine Underground but weather would work well too. You could even do a few for different cities and name them the city.

The page is broken up into 4 sections: Current, Radar, Forecast & Warnings. Current shows you all kinds of info like conditions, temperature, humidity, wind, even sunrise and sunset.

My favorite is the Radar section. Most important, it allows for animation. It also has three zoom options from Local to Region. There’s even a Severe Weather Overlay.

The Forecast is a list of the next 7 days with icons describing the weather and a small text description. It usually includes sunny or cloudy, precipitation percentage, temperature, wind, and night conditions.

Finally there is a warning section for some areas. This includes tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, etc.

Overall, I think this is the best weather application and runs quick even on slow connections. Best of all, it’s free! Please share your favorite weather app or web app. I’d love to hear what everyone uses to check the weather!

Who is Hot? has recently been updated so I thought I’d write about it. We did a little review of it on an iPhone 101 Episode but here’s a little more in depth review. First, I must tell you this is a weather app. I know the title may seem to suggest otherwise but this app has to do with temperature, not looks It takes all your contacts and based on their location, gives you their current temperature. With the previous version, this was based on address only but the new version also takes info from the first 6 numbers of your phone number, which includes the area code, to determine your location. Just remember that if you have a friend or family that has a cell phone from one city and has moved to another and kept their number this might make things less accurate.

When you first open the app it brings you to a list of your contacts sorted by name. The first contact is yourself; tap it to update your location. Across the bottom you can sort the list by first or last name, temperature, or distance from your current location. There is a nice scroll bar section on the right that will scroll you through your contacts faster by letter, temperature range or distance range. Each contact shows lots of info including an icon representing current conditions, city, state, and country, distance from current location, temperature and their picture. You can also tap the person’s name to see their contact info, or tap the current conditions icon for more details about their current weather from the Weather Underground iPhone formatted website right in the app.

The little “i” in the bottom right corner takes you to settings where you can turn off the feature that detects location by phone number. You can also switch to metrics. There is a scroll wheel at the top so you can pick which contacts the app uses. I can only see “All Contacts” so I’m assuming this works only with Exchange type contact lists. The applications seems to be getting a little cluttered but is still a fun little app.

Last but not least, you an tap the Weather Underground logo in the upper right corner to go to their iPhone optimized website right inside the app.

Click here to download Who is Hot? via the App Store.

Please send me links to your favorite web apps via our contact form on the about page and we’ll share them with everyone. Now, on to the Weather.com web app review:

The link for the iPhone is weather.com/iphone. Going to weather.com will still take you to the full site. The first thing you do is add your location. You can do this by tapping in your zip code or city’s name. You may add up to 5 locations.

There are three main choices at the bottom: Today, Maps, and Forecast. Today gives you all of today’s weather: temp, feels like temp, UV index, wind, humidity, pressure, dew point and visibility. It also gives you 4 more predictions for the next few hours. By tapping the “next” button in the top right corner you can view next 4 days of weather.

The Maps option gives you 3 map options and 4 weather overlays giving you a total of 12 different looks. Kinda like Google Maps, you get Road, Hybrid and Aerial. The weather overlay options are Radar, Clouds, Clouds/Radar and Loop. The loop gives you 5 frames.

Forecast option displays a 10 day forecast with a weather icon, high low temp and precipitation percentage for each day. You can tap on the column for more details of that day.

Another great feature is warnings scroll across in a red ticker. Tapping the details tab on the ticker gives you the full text description of the warning. Finally there is a tab in the bottom right corner titled “more weather” which takes you to a basic mobile page with more links. Looks like a page that would work on any mobile device. This page has links to video forecasts, pollen, almanac, ski reports, etc. Again, this all looks designed for any mobile device but still looks great on the iPhone.

A final note is that this website also looks great when the iPhone is rotated horizontally.