Android App of the Week: The Weather Channel

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Android comes with its own weather app installed, but it’s not the most in-depth of tools: the settings menu offers little more than a choice between Celsius and Fahrenheit, and the front-end offers only basic data.

That’s where The Weather Channel’s eponymous app comes in. Type in your post code or use your phone’s GPS to select a location and you’re presented with a wealth of meteorological information. Aside from basic temperature statistics, a small graphic indicates local weather and wind conditions, humidity, visibility and even the UV index. A quartet of tabs also opens up forecasts for the coming hours, days and weeks.

The innocuous-looking Map It button on each current forecast unleashes another torrent of useful information. Take the selection of layers that can be used on top of Google Maps: radar and cloud cover can be selected individually or mashed up, and zoom controls allow you to get a handle on the weather in your town or, if you’re interested, across entire continents. (more…)

Google Maps meets SimCity

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

If you, like certain members of the PC Pro team, wasted many, many hours of your formative years fashioning little cities of your own in Will Wright’s fiendishly addictive Sim City games, then this little gem will soon see you rummaging around your loft for your dusty, once-cherished floppies.

Some bright spark has taken Google Maps’ rendition of Hong Kong and sprinkled it liberally with two-dimensional, isometric goodness. Forget Street View, forget Bing’s Bird’s Eye view – this is better. Much, much better.

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1,000,000 keys and a celebratory holiday

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

You may remember that a while ago I reviewed a Logitech keyboard that tracked key presses. Well, I’ve been using it at my desk since then, and I’ve just passed into seven figures. It’s still going strong despite a few coffee-related mishaps, although I’m still not using any of the more esoteric features.

Considering that I only use it in the morning – I tend to migrate to the PC Pro laboratory in the afternoons, like a goose heading South for the winter – that’s a whole lot of typing.

To reward myself I’m going to take two weeks off work and go on my first holiday since time immemorial. Bye.

Online crime maps are a criminal’s adventure playground

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

So the PM has agreed to the idea of online crime maps to keep the public informed of goings on in their area. It sounds great, doesn’t it: just log on, type in your post code and see a breakdown of all the crimes committed near you this month, compared to neighbouring areas.

It isn’t totally new – Londoners can check their borough already at the Met Police website. And a quick look at the figures shows that – despite the media giving the impression we’re entering a new Wild West of guns and knives – crime in London has been on the decline for several years now.

At the time of writing, gun-enabled crime is down 11.5% on last year; violence against the person has dropped 4.8%; murders fell by 1.9% in the last 12 months and robberies are down a massive 19%.

But according to the papers it’s crime “hot-spots” that are the problem, so a plan like these online crime maps is the ideal way to highlight it, right? Wrong, and to illustrate why, I give you an example of an existing online crime mapping scheme:

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