The topic of weather comes up in conversation with our family and friends everyday of our lives. We experience weather daily and people feel the need to express how they feel about it, whether it be to complain about the rain or to show appreciation for the sunny skies. Everyone wants to know what the weather is like so they know what to wear. Realizing how social the weather actually is, Maplewoods Associates has created an application called Human Weather for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It combines the weather with the social networking giant, Twitter. It\'s an interesting concept, to tweet about how you feel about the weather, but it just isn\'t engaging enough to succeed in the app store.
The app consists of two main parts: the weather forecast and Twitter integration. The first page displays the current weather for your area at the top and the Twitter timeline at the bottom. The weather is pretty accurate, displaying an icon for sun, rain, etc. and the current temperature. The timeline at the bottom is small and shows your comments about the weather from people on Twitter. I\'m assuming all it does is search Twitter for keywords relating to the weather. The area is small, displaying only about three comments at a time and when you tap on a comment, the actually Twitter website opens up. Here, you can log into your account to reply to the comment, but this is much slower than replying right from the app itself. You can also type your weather related comment and post it to Twitter from any page of the app.
The second page of the app is the Advisor. Here, there are clothing words scattered throughout the page. This is supposed to tell you what other people are wearing today in your area, giving you a better idea of what to wear outside in the current weather. Sometimes, like right now while I\'m reviewing, the app will say "no clothing advice available right now." The next page is a forecast area which displays the weather for the coming days. These are simple, straightforward forecasts that are actually pretty accurate.
The iTunes description clearly states that Human Weather is an official Twitter client. Yes, it will allow you to read Twitter comments associated with weather and yes, you can type your own message to Twitter. But, if you purchase this app for its Twitter functionality you will be very disappointed. After using Twitter apps like Tweetie, TweetDeck and Twittelator Pro, Human Weather seems to be lacking so many critical features.
Let\'s start with reading comments. When you tap on a comment to read, the actual Twitter website loads in a browser and you have to log in to reply. This takes way too long and is certainly not the best approach to replying to comments. Also, you can\'t see any data about the user and the ability to quickly follow people is just not there. After you type your own comment to post, the app always takes time to get back to the main screen and displays "Locating the weather man..." each and every time. It\'s amazing how many times I saw that phrase, and let me assure you, it is incredibly annoying to see it so often. Also, when you type your own comment, typing is all you can do. You can\'t even upload a photo! I would think for a weather Twitter app, you would include a way to actually show people what the weather is like in your area as well typing a comment. This is a major oversight and will hopefully be corrected in an update. There were also plenty of times when the application could not find my location even though I had a strong signal. So, instead of a temperature reading I get to see big question mark.
Human Weather is definitely an intriguing concept. It\'s interesting to see what other people are saying about the weather in your area and it\'s nice to get Twitter and the weather is one application. But, with so many features missing from both the weather part and the Twitter part, I cannot recommend purchasing this application. You can talk about the weather and search for weather related comments with any Twitter application. There are free apps that give you the weather and there are plenty of free Twitter clients out there. I suggest passing on Human Weather.
