CARROT Weather v5.0 is here! It's a major redesign with many new features, the culmination of everything CARROT and I have learned about building weather apps over the past six years.

New Look

CARROT’s new design is brighter, cleaner, and easier to navigate. She now uses native UI elements to make her fit in great with other iOS apps - while still retaining the same personality that has made her so popular. 

The current observations section at the top is full of little touches of personality. Pay attention to the way the trees and the smoke wafting off the power plant react to your location’s wind speed, for example. (Just be careful not to disturb the nuclear reactor.)

The colorful new icons were built from scratch to be legible even in the teeniest Apple Watch complication. They’re not just bold and chonky, though: they pack in more information, too. There are icons for new weather conditions, like mostly clear and mostly cloudy. And the precipitation icons even give you a hint as to how much it’ll rain (check how full the water droplet is).

The biggest structural change, though, is the switch to a vertical layout. Breaking CARROT out of her cramped, everything-jammed-into-one-screen interface opens the door to so many new possibilities.

Cards

Cards surface interesting data that's usually buried deep in other weather apps. 

CARROT is smart, so she won't load your screen up with a bunch of useless cards. If you open the app on a relatively calm day, you might only see sunrise/sunset and moon phase cards. But when the weather starts to turn, new cards will bubble up to highlight potential hazards: a big drop in pressure over the next 3 hours, gale-force winds this afternoon, two inches of rain in the next day.

In other words, it's when shit is about to hit the fan that you'll realize just how useful cards are.

(You can, of course, customize which cards appear when and in what order. But more on customization in a bit.)

Details

As much information as CARROT manages to fit on the main screen, there’s much more lurking just beneath the surface. Tap (or long-press) any component on the Weather tab and CARROT will bring you to a details screen overflowing with meteorological goodness. 

The hourly details can graph just about every conceivable data point. Swipe the chart to advance a day - or use the toggle at the top to get a look at the entire week.

The daily details are no less powerful. But my favorite little feature here is the jump bar on the right side of the screen, which lets you quickly swipe through the days in the forecast without having to do a bunch of scrolling. (Lefties can move the jump bar to the other side of the screen.)

Cards have details screens, too. That’s actually one of the most useful things about cards: they can be used as quick links to get at the details for a specific data point. Along with the additional detail, each card also comes with an encyclopedia-style entry so you can learn about the associated data point and why it’s important.

Customization

CARROT has always been known for her customizability. Users love that they can configure the UI to display any data point they want. 

But I always felt like I was only scratching the surface here. People use weather apps for completely different reasons depending on where they live, what they do for a living, and what their hobbies are. That’s one of the reasons there are so many different weather apps out there: because different people need to see different data arranged in different layouts to meet their needs. One size does not fit all when it comes to weather apps.

So that’s why I created Interface Maker, a tool for building the weather app of your dreams.

You can add new components to the Weather tab, rearrange the ones you already have, change their designs, insert additional data points, adjust the spacing between them, and so much more. The system is incredibly flexible, allowing you to create entirely different designs to suit your exact needs. There’s really never been a more customizable weather app.

To keep you from getting overwhelmed with all the new options, CARROT unlocks customization elements in stages over the course of three days. (If you want to get access to everything right away, don’t worry: there’s an option to skip the wait.)

When you’re done perfecting your new design, you can save your creation as a “preset” (and even share the preset with friends so they can install it on their devices).

CARROT is including a selection of prebuilt presets to show you just how powerful the customization engine really is. Odin is the default. Chronos reproduces the old v4.0 layout. And there’s also Siren, Fenrir, Bahamut, and Puck. 

The best part about presets is how you can quickly swap between them. I normally use a slightly modified version of Odin, for example. But during the winter, when I’m on the lookout for snow in the week ahead, I like to switch to a custom Fenrir for its focus on the extended daily forecast. (And yes, if you're on an iOS device, you can tap those links to install and start using those presets.)

Despite all these new additions, I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface on customizability. There will be a lot of new and useful components coming in future updates.

New Content

It wouldn’t be a major CARROT update without new stuff to play with.

There’s thousands of lines of new snarky weather dialogue, 8 new secret locations, 20 new achievements, 30 new alternate app icons, and a bunch of new Easter eggs.

There’s even a dedicated CARROT tab now, which is where you’ll find secret locations and achievements, as well as some new sections like one for tracking your high scores on various weather data points.

New Business Model

The last major change is that CARROT Weather is now free to download with an optional Premium Club subscription. 

I announced this change earlier this month, so check that post for more details on how it affects new and existing customers. But rest assured, existing customers will get to keep all of the features from the original upfront payment version of the app forever and they will also have their current Premium Club pricing locked in.

Note that the free version does include ads, but they’re either for fake products or other indie apps. The latter are provided free of charge as CARROT's way of giving back to the awesome indie developer community. (It's possible ads may be sold directly at some future point, but users' information will never be sold or shared.)

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There’s so much more I haven’t even touched on yet, like the awesome new iPad layout, the quick actions triggered by long-pressing tab bar icons, or all the attention paid to supporting accessibility throughout the app. But this post is already long enough as it is.

Thank you so much to everyone who has helped support CARROT over the past six years. This community has helped CARROT grow from a silly joke app to the only weather app on the App Store with an Editors’ Choice award. I can’t believe how far we’ve come. But this isn’t the end of the journey, it’s still the beginning: there’s tons of exciting new features in the works for all of you.

CARROT Weather is available for free on the App Store.