Reply from the developer of Outside app
Hi,
I am the developer of Outside. Been a long time reader of Macrumors, never posted in the forums. I saw this thread from Google Analytics and wanted to post, because there are some misinformation.
First of all, thank you PBF for posting this. Also note, PBF is not related to Robocat anyway. For more information about us, visit our website:
http://robocatapps.com/
Ok, now to the comments. Thank you for all your feedbacks, but I felt compelled to reply to this thread as there are many people who might have misunderstood the app.
Yes, the UI is very different from other iPhone weather apps. We tried to be a different as we think that the current weather apps are a little boring to look at. And I think generally weather information is kind of boring too. Every time I see a weather forecast on TV, I always think "just tell me if it rains or not!" or "just tell me the temperature and so I know that I can wear t-shirt again!". So we tried to present the weather information in a fun, yet useful way, which resulted in this app. This app is targeted to people who would use it on a daily basis, without having to actively look for weather information.
It's pretty hard to judge Outside app from a few images, like you couldn't judge a person based on their looks. This is generally a problem on the App Store. So what you don't see (or failed to see) from these images are the fact that we do have a 5 days weather forecast. You have to swipe through the days to see them (notice the upper left corner, the calendar tells you the date and if it's forecast). And we do have detailed weather information above the animated weather visualization. Every weather condition is colour coded, so you will be able to tell the weather condition with a glance, and without going to the detailed view (which is just a single swipe away).
Hourly forecast is not currently available, because of the way we chose to design the app. We are considering put it in, in a future update, as this is one of the most requested feature. The other most requested feature is a forecast overview.
We do understand some advanced users want radar view. This is kind of problematic for several reasons. First, data providers for radar are often only provided to local cities. Generally it's country specific. We didn't want to exclude any users from having this feature when they see a screenshot of it in US. Second, people seem to angry about any apps that are more than $.99. We priced the app based on how much energy we put into making the app, and the costs of maintaining it. To license radar images would increase the price a great deal, as we are not a weather provider like Weather Channel or WeatherBug. We also felt that we probably won't make a much better user experience compared to other apps that do has radar. Also, more personal, I never look at those radar images. But that said, we still want to provide more useful information to the user, so we are still looking at the possibility of adding it.
Regarding the subscription part, it's only if you want to continue receiving push notification after the 30 days free service. The app still works for viewing the weather forecasts etc. It's a fee for all the notification types. Right now the fee is quarterly. The fee is to cover the costs of maintaining the servers. If Apple allowed background processing, you could have got it for free.
This post ended up being extremely long. I prefer twitter style 140 characters, so you can always catch me here:
http://twitter.com/williwu
Thank you for reading.
Willi Wu
