Aelios Weather review

Aelios Weather is a beautiful and unique weather app for the iPad from Jilion that uses a draggable magnifying glass on top of a satellite map find and display weather from anywhere around the world in seconds. Unlike other wether apps, Aelios has opted for a different user interface that make it fun and interactive to find weather information. If you enjoy experimental design Aelios will serve than impressive.

Drag the Swiss Army looking watch on the screen and Aelios shows the name of the city in its center point. You can pinch and zoom in and out on a world map. Once you find a location, tap the city name on the screen and Aelios pulls in the weather information in a radial format around a 24 hour clock. Using this format is a bit odd at first but once you get the hang of it, you’ll actually notice that the information is easier to digest.

Aelios wil point an arrow to the current time, and shows the upcoming 24 hours on the dial. There are 8 data points for every 24 hour period indicated by an icon, as well as city elevation, temperature, wind speed and wind direction using an arrow. Drag and rotate the watch like dial left and the view changes to show 7 days of data information. In the 7-day view, Aelios shows both high and low degrees for weather, as well as precipitation amounts.

Once you get the weather data for a city, Aelios shows a nice digital clock on the screen that updates in real time. This is a semi-bonus, and you could perhaps use Aelios on an iPad app sitting on a stand to get both time and wether info.

Another feature hidden in Aelios’s design is sunrise and sunset information. The clock shows white or dark blue areas, that denote where the sun rises and sets each day. This information is buried in the graphics so it’s not great if you are looking for exact minutes, although you can guess the data close to a 5-10 minute period just by eyeballing the graphics.

Aelios has an input for manual searching, as well as a GPS locator button for finding your location. You can’t store multiple cities as personal favorites in Aelios, so you’ll have to either drag around the map or type in city names each time.

One of the things I wish Aelios could do was to get more detailed information on upcoming days. Right now you just see the very basics.

Overall, Aelios is a really good looking app and uses audio feedback and touch based mapping to perfection on the iPad to deliver weather data. It is really great for quickly getting weather data for any point in the world just by using a few intuitive gestures. It works in both portrait and landscape views. If you are looking for an iPad wether app, Aelios should definitely be on your list of apps to consider.

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Aelios Weather was written by Joe Seifi on May 29th, 2011 and categorized under App Store, iPad apps, Weather. Page viewed 6676 times, 4 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.