"I have a good weather app. It's called...looking out the window". That is what my colleague Brian Fagioli told me when I said I was testing Minutely, a new mobile weather service. Still, despite that rather true comment, we all still want to look up those possibly inaccurate forecasts, and this latest offering provides a better way to do it -- or at least a better looking way.
The name is derived from the app's promise to provide real time details right down to the minute - the rain slider feature allows you to travel in time and watch the rain move across your location. Minutely will let you know if it will be raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting in any location you choose down to the minute for the next 2 hours.
However, the service also uses a gaming engine to render 3D images of the weather maps to display 3D radar in real-time, provides Twitter and Facebook sharing, allows users to easily correct the information, helping the app be as accurate as possible through crowdsourcing (very much like Waze does for traffic) and adds Sunrise and Sunset times, 9-day forecasts, moon phase timeline, full day forecast descriptions, day and night mode, an activity feed, and the ability to win achievements and rewards.
The app has just been released, and is free for users. It will require those customers to make it really work, just as Waze does, but that is really half the fun with these crowd-sourced services. My colleague, Wayne Williams, tested it out from his base in the UK and claims the app works quite well there as well.
The app is live now in the iTunes Store and will soon be open to Android customers as well.
[Update] Minutely is now in the Google Play store.