I've been keeping an eye on the weather with Clear Night, looking out for clear nights and comparing what it says with what I actually see when it gets dark. I tend to check it on my phone at odd moments through the day, to get a feel for whether the evening's worth going out for.
One thing that became obvious pretty quickly is that it's a bit of a faff to keep the website open, or to open it each time and find my way to the tool. It's much handier to have an app on your phone that you can launch straight away. And once you're on the website, you've got to scroll past the intro at the top of the page first, which takes up a fair bit of space for no real reason when all you want is the forecast.
So it made sense to have a leaner version as an app, one that just shows the key details.
What's different
Open it from your home screen and it goes straight to the forecast. The title and intro are gone, the header's a bit slimmer, and your location sits on one line rather than in a box of its own. That means the night cards and most of the evening's hourly breakdown are there as soon as it opens, without any scrolling.
Saving it also puts a nice little Clear Night icon on your home screen, so it sits alongside everything else and feels like a proper app. It's still the same tool as the one on the website though, with the same forecast and the same grading. It needs a connection to fetch new forecasts, and if you lose signal it'll show the last one it downloaded, along with when that was.
How to install it
As of today you can add it to your phone. On an iPhone, open Clear Night in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, open it in Chrome and tap Install if the page offers it, or choose Install app from the browser menu. The page shows the right steps for whatever you're using, so keep an eye out for this near the bottom:
The website stays as it is
Nothing's been taken away on the website, and it'll carry on working just as it always has. The app is simply a handy extra for anyone who, like me, mostly checks the forecast on their phone.
I hope it's useful. That's it for this one, short and sweet.
Clear skies!