WeatherPro

Developer: MeteoGroup Deutchland GmbH
Category: Weather
Version: 1.5
Release Date: October 24, 2008
Size: 4.9 MB
Price: $3.99
Rating 8/10

There are two kinds of weather people in this world. The first kind are the people that just want to know a little bit about what to wear that day, and for whom the iPhone's built-in Weather app works just fine. Then there are the people who want to know wind direction, dewpoint, air pressure, relative humidity, and real-time storm tracking and satellite images. For those people, there's WeatherPro.

WeatherPro is a very well-designed app. The interface is surprisingly clean for how much information it provides. The top two-thirds of the screen are devoted to the present day's weather, with the next week's weather scrollable down at the bottom. The weather direction vane is constantly moving, giving the cool impression that it's measuring it in real-time. A tap from the front page gives you a graph of the week's highs and lows, and precipitation risks. The weather is uncannily accurate, at least in my limited testing, in a place where the weather doesn't change all that often.

But where WeatherPro really shines is in its satellite and radar maps. They are animated, draggable, zoomable and pretty. At the moment, I am watching a violent thunderstorm drench Illinois, Indiana and part of Iowa, while keeping an eye out for the rest of the country. The satellite maps are equally well done, showing cloud cover across the country with a tap of the finger. The maps lose some detail as you zoom, but you get the overall gist.

Is WeatherPro too much weather app? Almost certainly. Unless you are a professional sailor or pilot, there is no earthly need to know this much about the weather on a daily basis. But is it fun, in a kind of weather-geek kind of way? Absolutely.