A world of weather reporters at your fingertips!
Ever wonder how the weather was in Venice, St. Petersburg, or Lima, while you were nestled on your sofa watching your local news? Well, now you can hook into a network where real people share real stories of what’s stirring in the skies they see. Weathermob is a crowdsourced app that allows members to check-in and share photos, descriptions and fun indicators of what they see out their windows. A world of weather reporters at your fingertips!
Weathermob is setup with channels, much like the channels you view on TV. Except in this case, each channel focuses on the type of feeds you wish to see. The basic channels that come setup when you download the app are: Everyone, Weathermob Stars, Locations, Nearby, and Random. The content of the various channels is not documented anywhere, but you can kind of get a feel for what each includes by reading the posts. Everyone seems to show all weather reports from all members. It’s not clear what Weathermob Stars offers, but most likely it might be reports from avid reporters.
Locations allows you to add places you want to know more about, so it finds all reports from those places and shows those on this channel. Nearby shows you the weather, well, nearby to where you are. Random is just any report chosen for the channel. All of these channels are available when you view the sidebar. You also have the option of creating your own channels, so you can view specific types of weather reports that suit your needs. When in the main viewing screen there are icons at the bottom to get you quickly to where you want to go.
You can post a report of where you are and what’s happening there. This is done by clicking the Weathermob icon bubble at the middle bottom of the screen. It allows you to upload photos, write some text, and select icons that tell the world how it’s going in your neighborhood, how you feel about it, and what’s a good thing to be doing at that moment. You can even hook into you Facebook and/or Twitter accounts. Lots of sharing and lots of feedback!
Most of the features are very easy to use and self-explanatory. There’s no need for a tutorial or Help, although I am a stickler for that kind of stuff, simply because I like examples – nothing that a little playing around with the app can’t fix! One thing, very minor, that stuck out, and seems like an easy fix, was the scrolling function when choosing your icons to describe your weather situation. You can scroll down, down, down, or up, up, up and then it stops. It is not circular, which would be very nice. So, if you hit the last icon available in a column, and you want to go back to the first, you have to scroll back up again.
I give Weathermob a thumbs-up because it’s fun to find out if it’s frosty in Finland or sweltering in Swaziland, just around the time you are getting ready to share what it’s like at your end. You could even use this app to plan a vacation at the right time of year, and who knows, if you’ve made a friend who’s already there, you may have a place to stay!
