Best new apps of the week: BeWeather 2 and #Homescreen
Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past two weeks that we believe is a must-have download for your iPhone or iPad. These apps will always be from various categories, but they are chosen because our own staff members love it and have been using them daily. So here are this week’s picks! Enjoy!
BeWeather 2
Always be in the know of the current weather conditions with our customizable App of the Week.
Are you a weather nut who hasn’t found the perfect weather app for your needs yet? Then you need to check out our App of the Week, BeWeather 2 from Bellshare.
In BeWeather 2, users get a beautiful interface that makes it easy to view all of the comprehensive weather data of your current city, as well as your favorites. While the default settings look great already, BeWeather 2 gives users full customization over the app’s appearance, including the typeface, color themes, and even weather icons. This alone gives the app much more flexibility than the competition, but it doesn’t stop there.
BeWeather 2 may have incredible amounts of weather data, but it is all presented in an organized and informative way. The main view shows you the current temperature, high and lows, precipitation chance, live map radar for storms and cloud coverage, an hourly and weekly forecast, as well as text forecast, and other bits of data like visibility, UV index, humidity, and more. And for the first time, users can pick and choose the nearest weather station for the most accurate conditions and temperatures for each location.
Thanks to iOS 8, BeWeather 2 also has a widget that is fully customizable as well. The widget can be customized with theme, font, icons, and you can even pick and choose what sections to show. If there are multiple locations saved, just scroll through them with the arrow buttons. The possibilities are endless with this single weather app.
We’re always on the lookout for our new weather app here at AppAdvice, and BeWeather 2 is it. It’s insanely detailed and comprehensive, and the option for customizing is something that we will always appreciate. If you’re a weather nut, then this is a must-have app. Get it on the iPhone App Store for $2.99.
For more information, don’t miss my in-depth review.
Honorable Mention #Homescreen
Sharing your home screen has never been easier thanks to our Honorable Mention for the week.
We always love home screens, right? Our Honorable Mention for the week, #Homescreen by Betaworks, makes it easier than ever before to share what’s on your home screen with the world.
Yes, it’s always been a simple task to share your home screen — just take a screenshot and then share the image to your social networks or just keep it for yourself. But one problem with this is that it was never easy to get links to the apps that you see on those home screens. You’d have to go to the App Store and search for them. Now, with #Homescreen, this is a thing of the past.
The app itself is as minimal as they come. When you launch it, the app will scan your Camera Roll for the latest home screen capture. If none is found, it prompts you to go take one, then come back to the app. Then it will ask you to link up your Twitter account, and then the home screen gets uploaded, and you can view it at homescreen.is/YourTwitterUsername.
What’s so great about #Homescreen, though, is the fact that they use image recognition technology, so it detects the apps that are on your home screen and provide App Store descriptions and links for other people to download or purchase the apps they’re looking at.
While this is pretty cool, you will encounter some incorrectly matched apps at times. You can inform the developers what is not matching up by selecting “Confirm App Detection” in the app when mistakes are made.
We have always loved sharing home screens, so we like what #Homescreen is bringing to the table. The image recognition technology is the best feature of this otherwise simple app. You can get #Homescreen on the iPhone App Store for free.
For more about #Homescreen, check out our original article here.