One aspect of fitness is dealing with the weather in a healthy and safe way. The Windows Phone app WeatherCare hopes to help you combat the elements in a healthy, safe manner by providing weather tips based on your current conditions.
Tips range from health related to clothing tips to driving tips. On rainy days you may get a tip to watch for slippery spots on the road or on sunny days with a high UV Index, tips to wear sunscreen for protection.
WeatherCare has potential and I like the concept, but the app still needs a little fine tuning.
WeatherCare is laid out across three main pages. You have Today's Tips, Now..., and a Settings page.
Today's Tips is a series of tiles that contain your tips that should be based on current weather conditions. The category of tips include health, driving, clothing, weather, sleeping and sports. Just tap on the tile and a pop-up window appears with the tip.
The Now... page has your current weather conditions. The information includes the current temperature, cloud cover, rain levels, wind speed, UV index, humidity, visibility, barometric pressure, and sunrise/sunset times.
The Settings pages has options to set your type of skin (fair to dark), your preferred climate, most commonly used vehicle (motorcycle, car or both), preferred measurement system, and enable/disable location services. The tips generated will be based, in part, from these settings.
Again, I think WeatherCare has potential but needs a little fine tuning. The tips, while having merit, don't always seem to fit the current conditions or are too obvious. For example, today's UV Index is showing a 4, which is considered moderate, and it's overcast with rain. WeatherCare's tips are suggesting the UV level is significant and I should be wearing sunscreen and I should wear outwear because it's cold. If I'm bundling up, why would I need sunscreen?
World Weather Online provides the weather data and while having access to current weather conditions is nice, there is no extended forecast available or a way to manually refresh the weather data. The weather information is based on your current location and while you know where you're at, it would be nice if your location was displayed on the screen to confirm everything. The last little nit is that WeatherCare lacks Live Tile support to give you a quick glance at the current conditions and tips.
All in all, WeatherCare is a nice app for your Windows Phone that has some helpful tips to improve your lifestyle based on current conditions. It just felt as a work in progress than a finished product. Luckily, there is a trial version available so you can give WeatherCare a try before investing in the full version ($.99).
WeatherCare is available for both Windows Phone 8 and 7.x devices and you can find it here (opens in new tab) in the Windows Phone Store.
