Celsius - Weather & Temperature on your Home Screen app review: a badge that functions as more than a reminder

Introduction

The Celsius - Weather & Temperature on your Home Screen app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch is a weather app that uses badge notifications to alert you to the temperature. This is a great feature for those of us who do not have time to wait for the weather app to load to see if we should be sending our kids to school in a parka or a sweater.

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Visual Notification

Celsius - Weather & Temperature on your Home Screen gives you a visual notification via the badge option of what the current temperature is for your location. This app can be allowed to use data to set your current location, which is great because if you are driving for the holiday and passing through several different weather zones, the weather will update automatically.

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I love that there is a visual notification so that I can quickly glance at the weather rather than having to wait for an app to load. This is a pet peeve of mine from my BlackBerry days. On the BlackBerry there was an app called WeatherEye that had the temperature in the corner, and the actual icon was updated to indicate the current weather conditions. The iPhone unfortunately cannot do this, so this is pretty close.

In addition to these great features, there is also cloud radar, temperature map, rain radar, wind map, satellite image, and the ability to post weather directly to Twitter or Facebook.

 

Visual Appeal

Celsius is not the prettiest weather app, but it does get the job done. There are a couple of skins that you can choose from, and the icons are pretty two-dimensional. It is, however, easy to read with horizontal rules to divide the different sections, a short-term and long-term forecast, and it allows you to preset various locations.

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Within the preset locations of your choice, you can easily check the weather back home while on vacation, or check your vacation destination! I love that I can look ahead along my travel route for snowfall in the winter. I like to know what kind of weather conditions in which I am going to be driving!

 

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Badge notification of current temperature
• Horizontal rules to divide sections make it easy to read
• Visual cues
• Audible notification if the temperature drops below 0°C at which point the badge represents a negative temperature

 

Cons

• Limited skins affect visual appeal

 

Final Thoughts

Celsius - Weather & Temperature is a great app for letting you know the current temperature in your current location. I love that there is a badge option for this, and that there are so many additional weather viewing options such as satellite and sharing to social media. I would like to see more skins, and also the ability to view the current weather conditions on my homescreen, but to my understanding this is an Apple issue, and cannot be worked around at this time.