Umbrella Day
A weather app that answers the only question that matters before you head out the door.
Most weather apps give you more information than you need. Seven-day forecasts, humidity percentages, UV indices — useful sometimes, but rarely when you’re standing in the hallway wondering whether you need that umbrella today or not.
Umbrella Day asks a different question: should you bring an umbrella today? That’s it. A clear answer, no noise.
The app fetches a forecast for your location and reduces it to a single signal. The design follows the same principle — nothing on screen that doesn’t need to be there.
The first version of this project was conceived in 2013. But then I just let it rest once I’d solved the geolocation lookup and acquiring of the weather forecast.
In 2026, I brought it back to life. The Yahoo weather service had been discontinued and is replaced with Open Meteo, and geolocation lookup is now done using Nominatim. Back in 2013 I just used jQuery for fetching data and manipulating the page — that could now be replaced with native JS functions. I’ve also brought in the hand-drawn graphics I originally made in 2013.
The first iteration back in 2013 looked like this:
