Seasonality Go Now Offers "Premium" Weather Features
June 22, 2010
The number of weather apps for the iPad just keeps growing. These include free ones (Weather Bug, for example) to ones costing a few bucks (Weather Radar HD). The latest, Seasonality Go by Gauch Software, is the first app that allows for heavy user customization, which might be a top selling point for some buyers.
Priced at $9.99, Seasonality Go is being marketed as a “premiere weather application,” although that may have more to do with its steep price-tag than for its features. Quite simply, the app has the tried-and-true weather features that you would expect from such an app such as current conditions, forecasting and map reading, but it is what you decide to do with those features that will determine whether the app is worth the premium cost. For example, the default screen includes a map, current temperature reading plus a look at past, current and future temperatures and precipitation. Finally, it includes a bar that shows upcoming day and nighttime temperatures for the next few days along with icons showing whether it will be sunny, rainy or the like. If you have a iPad 3G, the app will also show your current latitude/longitude position as well as your current elevation. Each feature is presented in a crisp, detailed and user-friendly format that I enjoy, and doesn't require the user to go from screen-to-screen like some other weather apps. Also, each feature can be easily swiped with your finger to show data further into the future, which as a concept is very cool. However, on this, I could not get data to show beyond the next 24-hours, which could be a bug. Once you get comfortable with the default data screen, you can add others, including ones called “Just the Graphs”, “Map”, “Travel” and “Marine.” Each one of these screens includes data for a specific purchase. For example, “Travel” will show important data for those traveling to another location, so that you can anticipate what type of weather to expect. The app will search from a database of 30,000 locations in over 200 countries worldwide to determine your present location. However, you can easily customize the app to include other locations. The number of locations that you include does not seem to be limited so you can add as many as you’d like. I am enjoying Seasonality Go, although I get the same information in one form or another from other apps at less of a cost. A "Lite" version would certainly go a long way in allowing a user to determining if $9.99 is good or bad, depending on your specific needs. Since a "Lite" version is not available, however, I would suggest that you wait for the price to come down or check out another weather app for iPad.
