What is it, weather week around here? That’s what a few of you may be asking yourselves but hey, we don’t plan these things, we just report on ‘em. Yes, another new weather app has gone live in the Store this week with the name Bright Weather by LevelUp Studio. While not a game changer, we are really liking the doublewide Tile that you see in our lead image and it’s worth taking a look.
Bright Weather offers a few unique things that make it worth your consideration, including pulling data from Accuweather. That’s a good thing as we tend to find Accuweather’s data quite reliable (though you may disagree) and it means we get access to their patented “RealFeel” temperature, which takes into account humidity and other factors for a more realistic current conditions reading.
The app itself launches relatively quickly (about three seconds) and while it’s not the fastest app, we don’t have any complaints either. Once launched, Bright Weather has some solid HD graphics including animated weather e.g. floating clouds, twirling sunlight and presumably rain (we haven’t seen the latter yet). The clouds float along nicely and it is certainly a neat effect, though we find the ReelFeel temperature at times hard to read (i.e. white font against grey clouds).
Bright Weather Features
- Multiple locations (geolocation available)
- Weather provided by Accuweather
- Current conditions
- Today forecasted weather information such as the chances of storm, or the quantity of rain
- 5 days forecast
- 12 Hours forecast
- Moon phases
- Dynamic Tiles
The font and layout of the main page fits in with the Modern UI (though obviously the photorealistic weather animation does not). It’s relatively easy to read with your location listed at top along with the date and current time. Certain areas of text match your device’s Accent theme, giving it a nice corresponding capability. Other information displayed includes percent chance of storms, rain accumulation, UV index and the day’s high and low temperature. Overall it's a very clean look and we like the font, colors and overall UI.
Swiping to the right and you get an hour by hour breakdown of the weather, including temperature and forecast along with wind speed and matching weather icons.
On the third and final pivot, you get a nicely laid out Moon phase listing, which while we don’t often use it’s nice to have anyway.
Under settings we find just Units and Geo-location options. There is no lockscreen support just yet, which is a bit of a shame as we’re sure the developer could do something nice there. Clearly they have the graphics chops to pull it off.
Bright Weather runs for a $1.49 with no free trial. That will probably be the end of the story for quite a few of you who insist on trying the app first—we don’t blame you either. Having said that, Bright Weather is a solid, well designed app with excellent graphics and we plan on using for awhile. While some of you prefer strict text or no photorealistic weather effects, we happen to like it for our Weather apps and aren’t as dogmatic.
The Live Tile is probably what you’ll look at most and we happen to think it’s quite a gem. The rest of the app is certainly nice but not exactly a must-have either, it really comes down to whether you like the looks or not. Regarding the price, we’re going to take a guess that accessing Accuweather’s data probably isn’t free, hence the cost of the app. But at a $1.49 for something you potentially use a few times a day, we’re okay with it.
Interestingly, despite the HD animated graphics, the whole app is a trivial 6 MB in size, which is something worth considering if space is a prerequisite. And yes, it will run on 512MB Windows Phone 8 devices.
If you’re ready to commit, you can grab Bright Weather here in the Store or scan the QR code below. $1.49, no free trial – 6MB – Windows Phone 8 only, including 512MB devices
