Some iOS users are immediately ready to embrace the new look and feel of iOS 7, whereas others are vocally not that keen on the new direction that Sir Jony Ive and his team have taken. Still, public opinion will always be split over things like this, so the best we can do is extract the positives that the majority of us can agree on. When it comes to the changes, it seems pretty universally agreed that Apple has a winner with their new native Weather app, with iPhone and iPod touch users running iOS 6.0+ now able to enjoy a similar experience thanks to Aero by Robert Paul Neagru.
Aero has only been sitting in the App Store for a number of days and has already managed to create a storm by immediately hitting the Top 10 charts in France and Japan, an achievement that should be applauded considering the small development team behind the creation. The first thing that stands out about Aero is the simplistic but stunning visuals that take full advantage of not only the Retina display but also Apple’s new guidelines on utilizing the edge-to-edge pixels that are available within a user interface.
Attention has clearly been paid to the methods of navigation available to the user, with the developer keen to reduce the app’s reliance on physical buttons. Instead, Aero implements a number of different directional gestures that allows the user to refresh content (swipe down), flick between different important locations (left or right horizontal swipes), view a card-based Wikipedia entry of the current location (long press on the location name) as well as deleting entries from the saved locations (right swipe on the table cell). Only two buttons appear in the main interface on a transparent navigation bar, with gestures handling the rest of the important actions.
When viewing the main interface of a specific location, only the immediately relevant information is shown. Current outdoor temperature along with a weather description of the conditions is most prominent. The app then shows humidity, wind speed and pressure levels as well as a five day forecast at the bottom of the interface that sits over the top of some subtle but gorgeous animations that depict the current conditions. For anyone wanting to step away from the current native Weather app, then Aero is definitely worth a download. Also, see if you can work out its neat little icon based secret.
(Download: Aero for iPhone on the App Store)
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