The saga of Windows 8 continues. When I have the time, I have been running Windows 8 on my laptop so I can get a feel for it and report my findings here. I wanted to personalize the new Windows but ended up in awe over the information readily available when it comes to the weather app.
Personalizing Windows 8, in my opinion, is limited and the interface looks very basic. Sure you can create a custom log on screen with a nice picture and even incorporate the picture to your unlock. But once logged in you are greeted with the dynamic metro tiles with a mundane, plain background that you can only adjust the colors on. What has happened to Windows Aero? The beautiful frost and transparencies are non-existent in the Metro Interface…
The Weather App however is beautiful to the max and has so much info associated with it I find it incredibly useful but daunting at first.
The Bing Weather App, start page, Windows 8
To the left is the start page of the Bing Weather App. The whole Bing motif is carried to this app by a dynamic background image representative of the current weather conditions. Now if you live in an underground bunker, you will surely find this very useful and thought provoking… The start page also has a 6 day forecast with pretty little weather icons for you to show off to your friends.
Not just weather information, weather information by the hour!
Moving to the right, the information deluge begins. Bing Weather’s second screen is an hourly forecast, that’s right, hourly. So if you want to know if it is going to rain at 3 o’clock, Bing Weather has an answer. Accuracy is not guaranteed though. But when is any weather forecast really accurate?
Weather maps of all kinds.
Continuing with the odyssey of info, Bing Weather has maps of both your region and country. I started to feel like a weatherman on this page; as I clicked on the maps, I was rewarded with a video of the weather in the region. This allowed me to come to my own (wrong) conclusions about the weather to come. Although cool, keep in mind video takes bandwidth so be warned.
For info-maniacs Bing Weather has Wolfram|alpha information.
If your mind isn’t numb from the information yet, continue to scroll to the right to get Historical Weather data from none other than Wolfram|alpha! Want to know what the temperature or rainfall was like in January this year? Bing Weather has it. Want to draw your own conclusions to global warming, Bing weather can help because it pulls the information from Wolfram’s servers.
Great for the traveler or the dreamer...
To wrap up, we’ll go back to the beginning. When you first launch Bing Weather, you can choose what place the app focuses on. As an added bonus you can add places, allowing you to see with a few gestures what the weather is like in other locales.
