Weather cooler is an app that lets you chat about the weather with anyone in the world who is experiencing the same weather conditions as you.
Nothing ties humans together like chatting about the weather. It's a global, shared experience that we can't do anything about. WeatherCooler groups you with others from around the world who are experiencing the same weather conditions as you.
Cold and rainy? Now you can commiserate with anyone else in the cold and rain no matter where they live.
Clear and mild? Gather around the weather cooler with other lucky folks.
There are lots of combinations of weather you can end up in and possibly endless amounts of anonymous strangers to chat about it with. You're welcome.
No good reason, that's for sure. If I were going to try and justify the existence of this app in some fancy-silicon-valley-speak, I'd say something like: "WeatherCooler is a social commentary app focused around the cliché of chatting up the weather around the water cooler with people you don't really care about.", but I would never put that in writing.
This was built in about 24hrs of a 48hr contest (I slept and also changed my idea mid-way like a true professional). It was built with React Native/Expo and Next/GraphQL on the client and server respectively. The realtime chat and presence were implemented using Firebase.
Since this is primarily a native app, it's a bit tricky to test but easy enough once you have Expo installed. I've outlined all the setup instructions here
It's also available on the web (Chrome only) here.
View the screencast:
https://youtu.be/JkUukMBfD4E
Looked great! The ux was satisfying and reminded me of Apple's design. Not a lot of people are always chatting about the weather though, no one else was in my chatroom 😕
Hey Mark,
I thought adding something similiar to my website (https://jaenis.ch/), so I picked up some resources. For example, there is a calculator to determine the colour of the sky:
https://blog.slashie.net/2018/09/22/openarthurianx6-skybox-tweaks/
If you were happy to see a future event, where I have location data: https://jaenis.ch/timeline/events/ the homepage of mine would give you some data about the weather conditions.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20191107061411/https://jaenis.ch/ for example.
I fetch the weather data from https://openweathermap.org/ and display the icons of open-weather-icons: https://www.npmjs.com/package/open-weather-icons
Perhaps you could take some ideas from there :-)
I could also imagine this being a fun Slack app ;-)
Good idea, and very well executed. It really feels like a native UI, it's amazing that you got that done in 48h. I just feel like I didn't get a lot of fun or utility out of it, since nobody was online.
Nicely designed but I kind of don't like the color scheme. Is a very fun idea and it was nicely implemented as well.
Mark Johnson
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, there's not much going on rn since the app isn't really "out there" yet.