Mercury Weather knows where you’re going
When I was planning my trip to New Zealand a couple of years ago, I got frustrated by the fact that there was no way to see, at a glance, the weather in the various cities I’d be visiting when I’d be visiting them. I could add Christchurch, Queenstown, Wellington, and Auckland as cities, but I’d need to toggle between them all to get a sense of what the weather was looking like later in my trip.
In frustration, I built a convoluted shortcut for my New Zealand trip that queried Apple Weather for forecasts from a manual itinerary. I could manually run the shortcut to see the future travel forecast. It worked, but it wasn’t glanceable and wasn’t elegant.
A few months after my trip, though, the iOS app Mercury Weather went and added a trip forecast feature, which lets you put your trip forecast on an iOS widget. It’s so good that I now pay for Mercury Weather ($2.99/month, $14.99/year, $49.99 lifetime purchase) just for this feature.
As with most other weather apps, Mercury Weather adds as many saved locations as you want. But you can also separately add Upcoming Trips, which are like saved locations but with a name, symbol, and date range attached. When the date of your trip comes within Mercury’s 10-day forecast window, the Daily Forecast chart in the app incorporates the data from the trip location instead of telling you what the weather will be like at home, where you won’t be.
But the home screen widget is my favorite. I usually keep a home-built weather widget visible on my devices, but it’s actually saved in a stack with Mercury Weather. When I have a trip upcoming, I swipe on the stack and switch to Mercury so I can see what’s in store. I’ll keep that widget active the entire time I’m traveling, so I can see what’s up in the next destination and also what the weather will be like when I get back home.
As Joe Rosensteel wrote about on this site last year, our mobile devices should get better at understanding that their users move around. They should. But in the meantime, I’m happy that Mercury Weather knows when I’m on the move.
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