In true British fashion, this week’s newsletter is going to be taking part in our national past-time – talking about the weather…
We’ve had quite a turbulent time of it up here in south Cumbria lately – tons of snow which then turned into ice and slush, thunderstorms while it was still snowing, then of course the inevitable non-stop rain, which combined with the snowmelt to cause quite a bit of flooding, and we had a yellow weather warning for wind on Saturday… it’s enough to send you diving back under the duvet until it all blows over!
But one useful thing that I’ve discovered this week is an app called Windy. As you might have guessed, it’s an app that keeps track of the direction and speed of the wind, as well as other typical aspects of the weather.
It’s the sort of app that’s very handy if you’re an outdoorsy kind of person – if you’re an avid hiker, or a keen cyclist, or a water sports enthusiast. Apparently it can be quite useful for fishing too, or so my partner tells me…
You can go to www.windy.com on any device, or you can download the Windy.com app from the Play Store (for Android users) or the App Store (for iPhone users). However, when you search for Windy, you might get two different options for a Windy app.
The Windy app with the blue icon is quite intense, asks you a lot of questions and gives you an awful lot of information at once – it’s very impressive, but not for the faint-hearted. The Windy app with the red icon is much more user-friendly and easy to understand, so I’d recommend using that one.
If you decide to install either of the Windy apps on your smartphone or tablet, it’ll ask to use your location, which is pretty understandable for a weather app. It’ll then show you a map centred on your location showing the wind direction, the temperature, a small forecast for the rest of the week and a more detailed forecast for the rest of the day.
If you want to change the units that the weather is being measured in, you can just tap and hold on the unit (it’s a bit fiddly though) to get knots instead of miles per hour or metres per second, or to change the temperature from fahrenheit to centigrade.
For people who only really look at the weather to know how warm a coat they should put on, Windy might be a bit excessive – you can probably stick to the BBC Weather app or the Met Office app, which are also available in the App Store or Play Store. In fact, a lot of smartphones and tablets have their own built-in weather apps, so have a look in your list of apps to see if you can find yours.
You can even make it so that there’s a little display on one of your home screens telling you the current weather conditions, which is pretty handy. But this newsletter is getting a bit long-winded (ha ha), so I’ll have to tell you how to do that next week…
surely it’s pastime, not past time ? I’ve seen this in the past a few times…..