AniMeteo

Name: AniMeteo
Price: 0.99 EUR
Author: Luca Mattiazzi

An Apple Watch face with an AniMeteo complication: a pixel-art countryside in a thunderstorm, lightning striking the house, next to 18°, Thunderstorm.

Weather, but tiny, animated and made of pixels, right below the time on your Apple Watch.

Apple doesn't let watch complications play animations. They can, however, show a timer that the system updates every second, and if you draw that timer with a very weird font you can make it pick which frame of an animation is visible. So that's what AniMeteo does: a 30-second pixel-art loop of the sky outside, in a rectangular complication, with no private APIs, and nothing has to keep running to animate it.

Is it useful? It tells you the weather. Is it necessary? Absolutely not.

What it shows

Now: the current sky. Clouds turn pink at sunset, rain falls in two layers and leaves puddles, fog rolls in, lightning hits the tallest thing around. It uses the actual cloud cover, rain intensity, wind and visibility from Apple Weather, so two rainy days don't look the same.

Next 12 hours: your day as a 30-second timelapse. The sun and the moon go across, daylight turns into dusk and night, and a coloured ruler at the bottom tells you when the rain is coming.

The Next 12 Hours complication: a timelapse with the time and temperature in the corners and a coloured ruler of the day along the bottom.

Next hour: rain and snow minute by minute, as little bars. This one depends on Apple having minute-by-minute data where you are. I live in Italy, where it doesn't, so I mostly get to see the message saying it's not available. Lucky you, maybe.

Things you'll spot

Six AniMeteo scenes: a thunderstorm in the countryside, a city at night with a car, a rainbow, a lighthouse in the fog, snowy mountains with a snowman, Halloween with a witch and pumpkins. — Countryside, city, seaside and mountains. Automatic picks the mountains above 800 m.

Walkers, cyclists, cars, dogs, deer, birds, planes and helicopters, picked for the landscape and the weather (nobody goes for a bike ride in a thunderstorm). Trees follow the seasons, the moon follows its actual phase.

On some days things change a bit: pumpkins and ghosts at Halloween, fairy lights and Santa at Christmas, fireworks on New Year's Eve, eggs at Easter. And roughly twice a day a UFO shows up and abducts whoever happens to be walking by. Nobody asked for that one either.

And it's not finished. I keep adding things with free updates: new animations, new visitors, new places, more holidays. If there's a scene you'd like to see on your wrist (your city, a holiday I forgot, a very specific dog), write me and it might end up in the next one.

Santa's sleigh flying over a snowy countryside at night.

The boring bits

€0.99 (or local equivalent), once. No ads, no tracking, no subscription, no account.
Apple Watch only, watchOS 10 or later. No iPhone app.
Three complications for rectangular slots: Modular, Modular Duo, the Smart Stack.
1, 2 or 4 frames per second. More frames, smoother sky, more battery.
Weather from Apple Weather. Your location is rounded to about a kilometre and only sent to Apple, to get the forecast.
English, Italian, French and German.

If you like it, a rating on the App Store helps more than you'd think. watchOS doesn't let apps ask for one, so I'm asking here: rate AniMeteo.

Something broken, or an idea for a new scene? Write me at luca@grokked.it.