OT: Hooray! BBC Weather change design back

Jamey

Sorry if this is a bit (or a lot) geeky but when BBC Weather redesigned their website in February of this year it really annoyed me as it was clearly a step backwards when it came to ease of understanding, particularly the five-day and 24-hour forecast sections. So I complained.

I guess other people must have done the same because they're changing it back soon:

pastryboy

Agreed - was much better before. I don't want or need fancy satellite images that take too long to load.

jairaj

yay! I too hated the new layout much preferred the old one. glad they're going back.

tailwindhome

+1

always_tyred

All they need to do is ensure that the contents in any way reflect what the weather will be and we are on to a winner.

Its referred to as the "Weather Foreguess" in the highlands.

Oddjob62

Always Tyred wrote:

All they need to do is ensure that the contents in any way reflect what the weather will be and we are on to a winner.

Its referred to as the "Weather Foreguess" in the highlands.

Yeah i only bother with it if i need to know the weather for the next 6 hours.

always_tyred

Oddjob62 wrote:

Always Tyred wrote:

All they need to do is ensure that the contents in any way reflect what the weather will be and we are on to a winner.

Its referred to as the "Weather Foreguess" in the highlands.

Yeah i only bother with it if i need to know the weather for the next 6 hours.

I find it problematic unless I can directly correlate to the weather outside right that second.

dsmiff

I was only ever interested in the wind direction and speed, that seemed to disappear with the new site - unless anyone else knows any different?

Pokerface

Personally I don't care what it looks like (old or new). But am getting REALLY sick of seeing nothing but rain in the 5-day forecast!

jimmypippa

dsmiff wrote:

I was only ever interested in the wind direction and speed, that seemed to disappear with the new site - unless anyone else knows any different?

It is there, just hidden as Jamey says:

Top set of writing above the second row of images.

Whilst we are at it, is anyone else annoyed about the silly map projection used in the TV forecasts. There is a lot of information about the Atlantic, which isn't too interesting, and the Pas de Calais has a similar screen area to the whole of Scotland. It seems a little eccentric to make sure that highest detail is for an area where none of your audience live.

This is the website that I use to see what weather I will get in the next few hours:

http://www.meteox.co.uk/h.aspx?r=&jaar=-3&soort=satradar

It gives a very smooth animation of rainfall radars for North western Europe, and I think is part of the Dutch Met Office.

mtb-idle

agree, the re-design was just for the sake of it. someone made a mint out of it.

Original was much easier to view

Eau Rouge

The only weather map that I can actually use to get an idea what the weather will be like is the map view, with the rain and sun plotted on it and a slider for times in the future (the default "general" view if you go to BBC weather)
It lets you see how much of a guess a predicted forecast is. If it's blue for miles around, and has been for a few slides, it's pretty much going to rain. If it's a few spots of blue moving across the country over time, it may well not rain.

deptfordmarmoset

This is the website that I use to see what weather I will get in the next few hours:

http://www.meteox.co.uk/h.aspx?r=&jaar= ... t=satradar

It gives a very smooth animation of rainfall radars for North western Europe, and I think is part of the Dutch Met Office.

jimmypippa's suggestion above works well and if you use a google sidebar there is a meteox gadget which gives you an instant satellite picture of current conditions with a link that launches the animated page that jimmy quoted. [/quote]

TheStone

This is good. I switched to metcheck as it has a nice layout, but seems to be down a lot.

Does anyone get weather on their phone? I'm looking for a good app that includes the
windspeed?

el_presidente

jimmypippa wrote:

This is the website that I use to see what weather I will get in the next few hours:

http://www.meteox.co.uk/h.aspx?r=&jaar=-3&soort=satradar

It gives a very smooth animation of rainfall radars for North western Europe, and I think is part of the Dutch Met Office.

that's quite nice

I like www.raintoday.co.uk also which is just the last couple of hours UK rain radar

oscarbudgie

Good to see the old format back - a lot of web redesigns are done just so techies can justify their salaries

solsurf

The best weather site for instant weather I think is www.xcweather.co.uk

If you scroll over the arrows it tells you more info and if you click on the arrow it gives you the weeks weather. It takes feeds from the weatherstations around Europe.

Sewinman

Huzzzzzzah huzzzzaaahh!

I like Metcheck.

thegibdog

Can I put a vote in for http://www.accuweather.com/ukie. I find this best for hourly forecasts, but like Eau Rouge says the BBC site is useful for the rain maps. The 3 hour periods on the BBC on pretty useless IMO.

panita

Finally a thread on UK weather maps!, a great passion of mine. (sorry if it's not actually the first on this).

As a year-round bike commuter, I simply love the functionality of the BBC's UK weather map and for exactly the point that Eau Rouge describes. That is, the 'big picture' of the moving cloud and rain is often much more useful in deciding whether to jump on the saddle in the morning or leave the bike at home.

I have the weather map as my home page on my PC's at home and work and have been working to make the map a standalone widget on the desktop which updates itself.

I also want to port the map to Symbian phones,

TheStone: The iphone does have a good working widget of the BBC weather map with wind speed which I'm using as a template:

http://bitbucket.org/edds/uk-weather-app/

This iapp also has the enhanced functionality of scrolling BACKWARDS through time, which is useful to see the rain cloud which just dumped on you on the way to work!