Recently, a tweet made the rounds criticizing the iPhone weather app, imagining Steve Jobs lurking in the background, taking sadistic joy in creating entirely random weather forecasts. If you share a similar sentiment, then you’ll want to check out Google’s latest update – a nifty, localized weather feature on its mobile website.
It’s nothing fancy or sophisticated, but it will quickly tell you what the weather is supposed to be like, wherever you are, at incremental times throughout the day.
“We’d been wanting to build a fun, useful, app-like way to display weather information on our search results pages in the mobile browser,” wrote user experience designer Nick Fey and software engineer Michael van Ouwerkerk. “So we pulled together a user experience designer and team of engineers and built a new weather search results snippet that lets you actually play with the results.”
The solution is simple, multi-platform and just requires that you search for “weather” using Google in your mobile browser. Upon searching for “weather”, you’ll receive a standard summary of the basic conditions, but the slider is where the neat stuff is at. As you grab and move the slider through the next 12-hour period, the sun will change to clouds or raindrops or moon depending on the forecast and the expected temperature, wind speed and humidity will change with it. Even the background will dim as the slider moves into the nighttime hours.
So if you, like some others on Twitter, like to imagine that Steve Jobs is lurking in the back rooms of Apple, deviously creating imaginary forecasts to mess with your day, give Google’s new weather feature a try. If you have similar visions about now ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the feature works on Android, too.
